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CONSTRUCTIVE 
NATURAL THEOLOGY 



CONSTRUCTIVE 
NATURAL THEOLOGY 



BY 

NEWMAN SMYTH 



CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
NEW YORK : : : : : 1913 



,S6 



Copyright, 1913, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published September, 1913 




// 



Oo 



PREFACE 

npHE number of thoughtful persons is in- 
creasing who desire to know in what state 
a full acceptance of the results of scientific re- 
search shall leave our cherished human faiths 
and hopes. They sometimes ask, Are we in- 
deed to lose our life and the ideals that make 
it most worth living for the sake of gaining 
a whole world of material knowledge? Shall 
nature be divested of its spiritual beauty and 
meaning as science takes reason behind the 
scenes and discloses the machinery of the stage 
on which the passing generations play their 
transient part? 

The writer of these pages has long been con- 
vinced that the scientific revelations of the 
processes of nature, and of our own lives as 
facts of nature, should all be religiously ac- 
cepted; and that the working theories also 
which are generally received in the scientific 
world, should provisionally, at least, be recog- 



vi PREFACE 

nized in theological thinking. With this con- 
viction the assurance has grown that the mod- 
ern sciences not only reopen old problems of 
philosophy, but also afford fresh and rich ma- 
terial for religious thought to gather and to 
use as vitalizing means of its own spirit. The 
sciences have gained full enough new knowl- 
edge to prepare the way for a new spiritual 
interpretation of nature. Yet in these fields, 
already white for the harvest, the theological 
laborers are few. 

The ultimate problem toward which alike the 
natural sciences and our spiritual faiths lead up, 
is the meaning of personality as a fact in na- 
ture. While engaged in preparing for future 
publication a volume relating to this central 
problem, of final significance, upon which many 
lines of inquiry converge, the opportunity came 
to me to deliver a brief course of lectures upon 
the Taylor Foundation of the Yale School of 
Religion. Doctor Nathaniel W. Taylor was 
one of a succession of theologians in New Eng- 
land who accepted and used the science of 
their times in their reasoning from the works 
of God. But to follow in this respect their 



PREFACE vii 

example would require of us in our day an 
abandonment of a merely neutral position and 
suspicious attitude toward science, and a posi- 
tive reconstruction of philosophical and relig- 
ious views of nature and ourselves. Religious 
education from the Sunday-school to the uni- 
versity, and in the trained and reverent free- 
dom of the pulpit, should follow a constructive 
scientific principle, and keep close to the facts 
of nature and life, if spiritual faith is to live 
anew; Lowell's lines, in the "Cathedral," af- 
ford an excellent motto for religious education: 

" Science was Faith once; Faith were Science 
now, 
Would she but lay her bow and arrows by 
And arm her with the weapons of the time. 
Nothing that keeps thought out is safe from 

thought. 
For there's no virgin-fort but self-respect, 
And Truth defensive hath lost hold on God." 

It was obviously impossible to condense 
within these lectures the contemplated system- 
atic presentation of the subjects considered in 
the following pages, and an adequate review 
of the extensive literature which their discus- 



viii PREFACE 

sion requires; I have sought, therefore, in an 
introductory way, to offer a rapid survey of 
the abundant scientific materials waiting to be 
utilized in religious thought, and to outline 
simply the method which, in a subsequent vol- 
ume, I hope to follow in detail more thoroughly. 
For this purpose it has seemed best to leave 
the form of spoken address, with some minor 
exceptions, unaltered. While occasional para- 
graphs indicate views to which I have been 
led, and some foot-notes refer to authorities for 
students to consult, a chief object of these lec- 
tures is to show what a rich scientific field is 
ripe for spiritual reaping, and especially to 
stimulate thoughtful believers, as well as pro- 
fessional teachers of religion, to go to school 
to nature for fresh inspiration and larger, se- 
rener faith. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Scientific Materials for Theology ... i 



II 

The Method and Problems 32 

III 
Christ as Final Fact of Nature .... 68 

IV 
Scientific Spirituality 98 



CONSTRUCTIVE 
NATURAL THEOLOGY 

I 

SCIENTIFIC MATERIALS FOR THEOLOGY 

'^J'ATURAL theology, or the knowledge of 
God to be derived from the works of na- 
ture, has commonly been distinguished from re- 
vealed theology, or the knowledge of God to be 
learned from the Bible. But the natural theol- 
ogy which some fifty years ago was taught in 
many of our colleges as a necessary part of a 
liberal education, has not only disappeared from 
the prescribed courses of study in the universi- 
ties, but it has ceased generally to be recog- 
nized as such in the schools of divinity. The 
once highly esteemed and much read "Bridge- 
water Treatises," with their reasonings from 
nature to God, now occupy places of honorable 
retirement on the shelves of the libraries; Pa- 



2 CONSTRUCTIVE 

ley's "Evidences " have been ruled out of court 
by Darwinian science; and even Butler's great 
"Analogy of Religion to the Constitution and 
Course of Nature" no longer is served at train- 
ing-tables for theological athletes; though an 
abundance of fresh sociological milk can hardly 
take the place of strong meat for those who in 
understanding would be men. 

The older natural theology, strongly built as 
it was from the scientific materials of its times, 
has been abandoned as an antiquated and no 
longer tenable fortification. But some the- 
ology of nature, constructed in accordance with 
the known mechanical principles of evolution, 
is indispensable to a reasonably secure religious 
faith. To fail to follow the progressive self- 
revelation of nature would be for us less manly 
in our thinking, less reasonable in our believing, 
and less free and brave in the mastery of the 
science of our day, than were our fathers before 
us as they stoutly maintained their well-fortified 
dogmas and held up their theological banners 
to be displayed because of truth. Natural 
theology may not now go forth with Pale) to 
find that remarkable watch in crossing a heath; 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 3 

but it may inquire what the least particle of 
earth has to tell of its atoms or the energies of 
electrons, while the flowers in full bloom on the 
heath may ask us to behold some diviner secret 
in their flourishing; and from afar and above 
we may take heed of suggestions of ethereal in- 
fluences amid which the worlds that do appear 
were fashioned of the things that are not seen. 
It may well be true that if intellectual power 
were given us to search through the infinitude 
of outlying space, we might never meet face to 
face a Divine Artificer, or discover the universe 
to be a vast assembling-room of mechanically 
designed elements and worlds; but possibly in 
our time, if we have eyes to see, we may behold 
a Sower going forth to sow in the fields of in- 
finite space, and with new wonder consider the 
clusters of the stars how they grew. Yet not 
with naive childlikeness merely may we trans- 
fer the parable of the lilies of the field to the 
constellations of the heavens. If our spiritual 
imagination is to be scientific; if religious faith 
is not to be a child's fancy thrown lightly out 
upon the mystery of the world; then a new nat- 
ural theology must be formed from the ascer- 



4 CONSTRUCTIVE 

tained data of natural science. Faith is to be 
once more a man's achievement; belief a rea- 
sonable generalization after laborious research 
into the elements and processes given in human 
experience. Such a natural theology is to be 
based on foundations of known facts of nature; 
it is to be built with as little hypothetical the- 
ory as possible; its soundness is to be examined 
after every new advance of science; its inner 
truth verified in any profounder insight into 
life. 

This is indeed a hard saying; and we may well 
ask, Who of us is equal to it? No one intellect 
is; no single science is; nor is any school of 
philosophy, not even the most confident prag- 
matism, equal to this task. Nevertheless, 
many minds and countless investigators — they 
who have eyes to see the least things in nature 
that they may understand the great, or ears to 
hear the whispers of the Spirit in human experi- 
ence that they may catch the full meaning of 
life, — these all are coworkers in discovering the 
significance of the creation; these shall be in- 
terpreters of man's spiritual vision of the heav- 
ens, and his dream of ideal ends of being. But 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 5 

whoever fears with clear-eyed reason, though 
often with hushed heart, to set forth on this 
great adventure of science and faith; whoever 
dares not face reality in the spirit of a man; he 
may become a scientific automaton or a theo- 
logical talking-box, but never a true thinker or 
a great believer. Only a theology fairly won 
from nature and experience can command the 
modern mind. What are we doing to meet 
this demand? 

I would raise this preliminary inquiry — one 
might almost say this challenge — to the min- 
isterial education and theology of our day: 
How are we facing this demand? What are 
we doing in the education of the teachers of 
religion to provide a natural theology adapted 
to the modern mind ? 

It may readily be answered, the philosophy 
of religion has now a large place in collegiate 
courses, and some recognition in most divinity 
schools. But that title betrays unfitness for 
the specific course now required. It is not first 
a philosophy but a natural history of the relig- 
ious consciousness that we must seek in order 
to understand what personal life really means. 



6 CONSTRUCTIVE 

If we go first to nature with ready-made phi- 
losophies to be proved, we shall return no wiser 
than we went. 1 

My question now is: To what extent is it 
required in the education of students for the 
ministry that (either in their college studies or 
in some seminary courses) they shall be well- 
grounded in the sciences — such as physics, gen- 
eral biology, or experimental and genetic psy- 
chology? Is instruction in natural theology 
in schools of divinity keeping pace with ad- 
vances in natural science? The sciences are 
so progressive in their experimental methods 
that their laboratories have to be constantly 
renewed. But when one observes how meagre 
provision is generally made for the education 
of theological students in scientific methods 
and results of research, he may wonder whether 
it is due to poverty of endowments that a bet- 
ter equipment is not provided to fit clergymen 

1 1 would not be understood as depreciating much work that is 
done in courses of divinity commonly designated as Apologetics, 
Theism, and Philosophy of Religion; and I would acknowledge 
especially the thorough work which the late Professor Samuel 
Harris, of the Yale Divinity School, completed in his published 
lectures on "The Philosophical Basis of Theism" and "The Self- 
Revelation of Cod." 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 7 

to understand the modern mind in its scien- 
tific passion to find out what can be known, or 
whether it is due to the same reason that Sam- 
uel Johnson once gave to a woman who asked 
him why he had defined in his dictionary the 
word "pastern" as the knee of a horse: "Ig- 
norance, Madam," he replied; "pure igno- 
ranee. * 

To young men who are thinking of entering 
the ministry are we ready to give such advice 
as this, which, from "The Corner of Harley 
Street," Peter Harding, M.D., wrote to his 
son, who was considering entering the medical 
profession: "You must ask yourself, with all 
the earnestness of a novice at his altar-vigil, 



1 In New College, Edinburgh, such instruction is furnished, and 
examination in Professor Simpson's course, of general biology is 
required for a degree in divinity. In looking through the courses 
of some thirty-four Protestant theological seminaries in this coun- 
try I have noticed three in which some specific scientific teaching 
is provided, or required of students in advanced courses. In five 
others natural theology is to some extent recognized under other 
names; there are traces of it as minor parts of instruction in other 
seminaries; in most of them, however, the symptoms of such 
teaching are not sufficiently marked to enable one to diagnose 
positively its character. Two features characterize generally, 
with some honorable exceptions, this teaching: the method is 
negative, it is an attempted destruction of scientific objections; 
and also the books referred to are not distinguished by familiar- 
ity with scientific researches up to date, 



8 CONSTRUCTIVE 

'Am I prepared to know?' . . . The eyes of 
humanity are turning slowly, but very surely, 
toward the man who knows. Are you prepared 
to become such a man? . . . You will prob- 
ably turn upon me and say, 'But to cultivate 
this habit of forming proper mental pictures, 
I shall have to become at least a chemist, a 
physicist, a pathologist, a bacteriologist, to say 
nothing of a philosopher; and how can a single 
human being, however industrious, contain as 
many persons as these?' And of course he 
can not. Upon no more than one branch of the 
tree of healing will it be given to you to climb 
out a little farther than your fellows; but, at 
any rate, you can keep your eye upon the others. 
It is in this way alone that you can become 
a scientific physician in the best and broadest 
sense. And you can take my word for it that 
it will never be worth your while to become 
any other sort of a sawbones — an exacting pros- 
pect. " (Pp. 24 sq.) Shall any less be required 
of a physician of souls? Shall not he keep his 
eye on the other branches of the tree of life? 
Is it worth while to become any other sort of 
a theological sawbones? An answer comes to 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 9 

us here from an oft-repeated word of the New 
England theologian, in whose memory this lec- 
tureship was founded; it sounds like a bugle- 
call: "Follow truth though it takes you over 
Niagara !" With this note religion itself may 
make its appeal to students of divinity to be 
men who will know. 

Let me emphasize at the outset the first word 
descriptive of the natural theology that shall 
be adapted to the need of the modern mind; it 
must be constructive. We are not here on this 
earth as beings "breathing thoughtful breath," 
to spend that breath chiefly in arguing one an- 
other down; happily the controversial divine, so 
fitly characterized by Doctor Thomas Fuller in 
the stormy period of the seventeenth century, 
is rarely to be met with now in good Chris- 
tian society. Truth calls us to better service 
than to manufacture proofs against manufac- 
tured objections; it bids us seek until we find 
it. We are here to use our reason to the ut- 
most, to learn what may be known of realities 
— of what is right and true, and well worth 
living for in our brief hour in the midst of this 
daily wonder and partial revelation and vaster 



io CONSTRUCTIVE 

significance of the universe. The first task, 
therefore, of natural theology is to discern what 
indications, if any, are given in the natural 
sciences for the reasonable interpretation of 
the world and ourselves in it. Where, then, 
are we to look for the materials for such con- 
structive thought? 

The answer in general is near at hand: all 
ascertained facts of science are material for nat- 
ural theology. From far and near, from the 
least to the greatest, everything that research 
may discover, or experience make its own, is 
to be welcomed as having worth and meaning 
for the interpretation of the world. To nat- 
ural theology, with its outspread sheet, nothing 
can be common or unclean. 

There is nothing merely so mechanical in 
physics that it can be understood only as a 
problem of strains and stresses; nothing so 
purely quantitative that it can be left entirely 
to the mathematicians; nothing so simply 
chemical that it can remain wholly in the re- 
torts of the laboratories; in short, there is not 
a single thing in the universe that exists for 
itself alone; in their correlations, taken alto- 



NATURAL THEOLOGY u 

gether, existing things constitute the reality 
that is given us for our rational interpretation. 
To say this is to assert the right of natural 
theology as a pupil in the laboratories of the 
university; at the same time it is to acknowl- 
edge its duty to enter there as a learner that 
it may become a master among the teachers 
of the meanings of life. This is by no means 
to confuse science by introducing metaphysics, 
but it is to bid the philosophy of religion first 
to go to school to the natural in order that it 
may become fit to enter into the kingdom of 
the spiritual. This is likewise to recognize in 
nature without us the same double aspect that 
is presented in personal consciousness — the too 
often overlooked truth that all material fact 
presents to us a transcendental problem; every- 
thing that is given in nature is given as an in- 
terrogation to the reason that is in man. Thus, 
to take a single example, in the Cavendish lab- 
oratory, radium rays were passed through a 
supersaturated tube which had been ingen- 
iously contrived for the desired experiment 
{beta as well as alpha rays being used). As a 
ray passes, it causes the atoms through which 



12 CONSTRUCTIVE 

it goes to break into corpuscles, called ions, and 
on these, at a sudden expansion of the gas in 
the tube, minute drops of moisture are con- 
densed, so that the radium particle leaves after 
it to mark its way a vaporous trail. By a 
simultaneous electric flash that line of vapori- 
zation was photographed, so that one may 
see the very path along which an infinitesimal 
particle of a radium ray took its flight through 
the tube. On these photographs a curve at 
the end of some of these vaporous lines shows 
where a corpuscle had dropped its electric 
charge, slowed up, and become inert. 1 Ocular 
demonstration has thus been given of things 
invisible, which theoretical views of the con- 
stitution of the atom had rendered probable; 
what no eye has seen or can see has been 
proved to be existent; these infinitesimal par- 
ticles of the radium rays have become evident 
and measurable in their streaming through the 
atmosphere of that glass tube, as is the passage 
of a comet with its train of light across the 
sky. We know now that the electrons are — 

1 Proceedings of the Royal Society, A. vol. 87, 1912, p. :--. 
C. T. R. Wilson. 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 13 

but what are they? What does all this, of 
which I am speaking, taken as a whole, mean 
— these dissociated atoms, these unknown yet 
demonstrable electrons, these motions, colli- 
sions, separations, recombinations, and those 
other rays still more ethereal in that same glass 
tube in the Cavendish laboratory; and, fur- 
thermore, the mind devising, arranging that 
tube with its unseen contents, and by a simul- 
taneous electric flash causing it to reveal its 
secret; the trained intelligence that found 
there the very substance of the things which 
it believed must be there, or else it could not 
understand the things that are seen? What, 
as a connected whole, do all these things to- 
gether signify? What does it mean — this veri- 
fication of a reasonable expectation which na- 
ture gives to the reason watching in man? 
Physical science hands over to natural theology 
this vacuum tube with its new revelation of 
invisible energy, that it may be comprehended 
in the omnipresent mystery of divinity still to 
be revealed. But if our theology is not faith- 
ful in this molecule of radium, which is very 
little, how shall it be faithful also in that which 



i 4 CONSTRUCTIVE 

is much? If in our schools of divinity we are 
not faithful in this material knowledge, who 
shall commit to our trust the true riches? 

Let me mention another illustrative instance. 
I look through a microscope at a section of the 
egg of a humble worm, Ascaris. I have the 
wonder of the world of life there beneath my 
eye on that glass slide. What does that dot 
of matter under the microscope mean? What 
do these things mean? — its constitution, its en- 
ergy as living matter, its subtly co-ordinated 
and definitely determined processes of division, 
multiplication, development in one specific di- 
rection selected from numberless divergent ways 
that other cells are taking? By what powers 
of nature has it been predetermined, by what 
factors was it held true to its single end, to be 
a worm Ascaris? 

Biology has still far more to learn of its 
chemistry, to trace more clearly its structural 
lines, to peer, if it may, more deeply into its 
elemental substance. In such patient research 
of the biologist it is no business of the meta- 
physician to interfere with his Absolute, or for 
the theologian to forestall inquiry with his final 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 15 

causes; nor for that matter should evolutionary 
philosophy itself interfere with its own science. 
Nevertheless, the biologist is a man for all 
that; and when he looks up from his task, 
as you and I and all thoughtful people do, 
and thinks over and all about any observed 
fact; then he becomes a metaphysician, a phi- 
losopher, a theologian, whether he will or no; 
and the real question, as we think over things, 
and of ourselves as included among them, is 
only the question whether we shall be good or 
bad metaphysicians. Philosophers, theologians 
of some kind, we all of us at times have to 
become, we all are made to be by virtue of the 
inner dynamic of our personal nature; as veri- 
tably as that egg has to become a worm of the 
species Ascaris. For us, that cell, as I am 
speaking to you of it, is not merely a dot of 
matter that happened to be on that glass slide; 
under a human eye it became a cell differenti- 
ated from myriads innumerable of similar cells; 
it became a selected cell, holding a definite po- 
sition and serving now a use not predestined 
by its natural determinants. It acted upon the 
retina of an eye at the other end of the micro- 



i6" CONSTRUCTIVE 

scope, and its impression stimulated in turn the 
cortical areas of that other, that intelligent 
optical instrument which a man is supposed to 
carry about with him in his head. Now, this 
whole complex situation, I am saying, — a par- 
ticle of a worm's egg, a microscope, itself made 
for a purpose, an intricate physiological appara- 
tus, a psychical process, itself mixed with mem- 
ory images and held to a purposive will; and 
beyond all this, the idea which just at this mo- 
ment I am reflecting upon your consciousness, 
to find, maybe, a lodging-place among your 
ideas: these things, not to mention other par- 
ticulars, taken all together, constitute a problem 
of meaning, the problem which no science by 
itself alone may presume to solve. After the 
sciences have all had their say, it is the high 
calling of natural theology to take up their 
parable; what interpretation of it is to be 
found by the spiritual man, of whom it was 
said, he " judgeth all things, and he himself is 
judged of no man"? 

For the sake of an example I have thus in- 
troduced to you this acquaintance of mine from 
the lowly walks of life, the humble worm As* 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 17 

caris — its full name is Ascaris megalocephala; it 
may have something to tell us in our studies 
of divinity. For if one could discern the last 
substantiality, the innermost secret of the life 
taking specific form in that microscopic cell, 
he might come nearer finding what Tennyson 
once said all his life long he had been seeking — 
a new vision of God. 

'Flower in the crannied wall, 
I pluck you out of the crannies, 
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand. 
Little flower — but if I could understand 
What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
I should know what God and man is." 

From the wealth of material that the sciences 
are gathering for a new construction of natural 
theology another example may be fittingly no- 
ticed in this lectureship, for Doctor Nathaniel 
W. Taylor, had he known it, might have wel- 
comed it in his notable effort to prove that 
this world, in the place where it is, is the best 
possible world. I refer to a biological speculation 
that may throw a gleam at least of light into 
the dark mystery of the origin of evil and 
death. That is physically a question of nat- 
ural science before it becomes a problem of 



1 8 CONSTRUCTIVE 

religious philosophy. It is, accordingly, very 
much to the theological point to inquire whether 
we know anything or not concerning the en- 
trance of death into life. Ever the positive of 
human love is shadowed by the mystery of 
death. But did death first come to deny life? 
Biology renders a tentative answer: death, 
likewise, came not to destroy but to fulfil life. 
Inquire of nature if this, indeed, be so. I am 
shown in the biological laboratory a Parame- 
cium, one of the unicellular protozoa. Each 
Paramecium, it should be explained, multiplies 
by division into two, the whole body of the 
parent cell surviving in the daughter cells. 
How long can that process continue without 
death ? Some years ago Weissman held in sup- 
port of his theory of heredity that among the 
protozoa there is no natural necessity of death. 
A French investigator, Maupas, succeeded in 
carrying on the succession for over six hun- 
dred generations, but then senescence occurred 
and life gave up its task. Professor Woodruff, 
here at Yale, has succeeded in carrying on the 
line of descent almost indefinitely unbroken by 
death; it was the thirty-six hundredth pareme- 
cium, when I inquired the other day after its 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 19 

health. The professor, of course, takes one of 
the two daughter cells after each division to 
continue the line of descent, himself putting 
the other to an unnatural end; if he did not, 
assuming sufficient nutriment could be pro- 
vided, the mass of matter heaped up by the 
rapid multiplication of these paramecia in a 
month would be approximately equal to the 
mass of the earth, and within the five or six 
years since he began his experimentation, it 
would have mounted up toward the mass of the 
known universe. 

On the next higher stage of life — that of the 
metazoa, organisms of two or more cells — death 
has entered, and is found with other evolution- 
ary factors at its work. What does it work for ? 
The biological answer is not in all respects ex- 
plicit, but it may be said that it is one of the 
factors of variation, and that it works for the 
further differentiation and enrichment of life. 
Some biologists find the beginnings of natural 
death coincident with the rudiments of sex. 
Strictly speaking, it may be said that death 
appears as an incidental condition in the ad- 
vancement of life. Subsequently and obviously 



20 CONSTRUCTIVE 

throughout evolution death balances the book 
of account between life's ratio of fertility and 
its means of living. We owe our human birth 
to death. We are the living children of a world 
that has died for us. If, then, we may win from 
nature any assurance that death itself has its 
place as a servant in the work of life, that it has 
its reason for being here on a principle of utility, 
we may then conceive that death may also be 
discharged from service when no longer use- 
ful; that death may be atrophied in the high- 
est embodiment of spiritual personality; in 
that consummate realm of life made perfect, 
where they neither marry nor are given in 
marriage, its work done, its use ended, death 
shall be no more — even as already in the Christ- 
consciousness of life we are passed from death 
into the life eternal. 

I would throw this out, however, simply as 
illustrating the many suggestions which biolog- 
ical studies bring to minds thoughtful of the 
outlying mystery of human life and the deep 
things of God. 1 

1 The author discussed the natural utility of death in a book 
published several years ago, entitled, "The Place of Death in 
Evolution." More recent biological science does not alter ma- 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 21 

With these brief indications of the wealth of 
material to be worked over by a thorough nat- 
ural theology, let us fix clearly in mind its spe- 
cific aim. Its work is to search for the mean- 
ings of things. It is differentiated from other 
inquiries which may have this end, inasmuch 
as it starts from the nature side. Its way of 
approach to its conclusions is through nature. 

Natural science as such has only indirectly, 
while natural theology has directly, to do with 
the problem of meanings or values. The phys- 
icist reaches the limit of his experiments when 
he discovers how things are so constituted that 
they must act and react as they do. Natural 
science is concerned with the relations of phe- 
nomena; it need not be diverted from its task 
to chase through the universe after Kant's 
" thing in itself. " The scientist has no scientific 
right to have any personal interest in things; 
he must make himself as impersonal as a man 
can be in his laboratory; the diagnosis of a 
physician has nothing to do with his personal 

terially the basis for the reasoning there pursued. It has in Pro- 
fessor Woodruff's successful experiment confirmed rather Weiss- 
man's view that in the constitution of protoplasm there is 
inherently no natural necessity of death. 



22 CONSTRUCTIVE 

concern for his patient, and he might be misled 
if it did. So Mr. C. Lloyd Morgan in his latest 
book on "Instinct and Experience" confines 
his inquiry strictly to the constitution of ani- 
mal nature and the behavior of his favorite 
moor-hen, and he pulls himself up whenever he 
finds himself facing the question of the "source" 
of any organic law or habit. It is noticeable, 
however, that every few pages he has to hold 
himself back from looking over his physical 
fences, and that he can not help casting an oc- 
casional side glance into Bergsonian philosophy 
as he goes along his own way. But the saying, 
"Nature for the nature searchers," is an excel- 
lent maxim for the laboratories. As Mr. Mor- 
gan has to begin somewhere, he strikes into the 
way of life at that precise distance from the 
source where the chick of his moor-hen makes 
the first peck at the shell, and from that point 
he traces the development of instinct proper 
through its modifications by experience and 
the growth of animal intelligence; he concludes 
his valuable observations with the remark that 
it is for the interest of science and metaphysics 
alike that they should be kept apart. 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 23 

And so, indeed, it is while we are specializing, 
and so far we can specialize nature itself. But 
that will not be long, nor does it go far. Our 
specialties define our divisions of labor; they 
mark the metes and bounds of the fields given 
us to cultivate, but they are our fences only 
drawn over the common earth, and above 
them all we look up into the same sky. In- 
deed, just this is one of the great lessons that 
the several sciences are bringing home to us, 
as men have never felt it so profoundly before, 
that nature is one nature, its history one his- 
tory, its law one law, and its God one omni- 
present Reality. 

It is a splendid gift of modern science to 
modern thought that it demonstrates this unity 
of nature and our personal oneness with all this 
"the mighty world of sound and sense," the feel- 
ing of which lies deeply in the heart of modern 
poetry of nature. It is a twofold lesson that 
we are taught — the discontinuities and yet the 
continuities of things. Outward objects are 
concrete, having distinguishable forms and spe- 
cific characters; yet at the same time they 
are correlated and in energies continuous. Our 



24 CONSTRUCTIVE 

conceptions of things may be analytically de- 
termined, like the lines of longitude or latitude 
which the mariner passes, but which are not 
drawn across the waves of the sea. There are 
specific forms in evolution, but our classifica- 
tions cut not deeply into the substance of out- 
ward reality. Common sense sees at a glance 
the difference between the grass and the cattle 
browsing in the field, while the scientific eye 
can hardly discern where the one kingdom 
begins and the other ends. Our perceptions 
are broken images, where nature knows no 
breaks. Events succeed one another, yet as 
waves of the one underlying ocean. The 
branch of an elm is etched to our eye against 
a clear wintry sky; but if it were drawn across 
the retina of a more microscopic eye, the lines 
would be a pattern of finer tracery where the 
twigs of the topmost branches end and the 
sky begins. Still more subtly discerned with 
ultramicroscopic definition that pattern seen 
by us against the sky would resolve into tracery 
of finest motions; the molecules and electrons 
having distinctive signs, yet interchanging, re- 
bounding, no longer that sharp definition of 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 25 

branches, but a waving line of radiances, as a 
quivering edge of flame — each beginning and 
ending undefinable as the twinkling of the star 
in the sky above. Would we seek still to mark 
the very point, to hold fast the very motion 
where the topmost twig is twig and the sky is 
sky, we should need intelligence divine enough 
to trace these elemental appearances back to 
their first distinctness as they came forth ethereal 
whirls of matter; members are these all of one 
another, both great and small, yet differing in 
their glory. Has not the keen-minded Lotze 
taught us that forces do not act; at a distance, 
that one thing is in another where it begins 
or ends? and Goethe said: "Nature is neither 
kernel nor shell; she is everything at once." 
So, as scientifically known, and as poetically 
felt, the bough is one with the sky, and the 
sky is one with the bough, though neither is 
the other. Hence, likewise, for this is the 
point to which I would return, these sharply 
separated specialties of ours, our sciences, our 
electives, our humanities and theologies are 
useful and necessary for our analysis and work; 
they are our fixation of that which is given in 



26 CONSTRUCTIVE 

the flow of experience, but they are not absolute 
differentiations; they do not reach down to the 
vitalities of our personal being. Consequently, 
we do not know ourselves if we are to ourselves 
only scientists or philosophers, thinkers or 
lovers, or any of our specialized kinds of selves; 
we can know ourselves deeply and all-round 
only as we breathe and feel and think and 
love in unison with all that is and lives and 
loves. The analysis is the task of science; the 
synopsis is the gift of life. Nor are such ob- 
servations uncalled for in view of the arbitrary 
and superficial separations which are some- 
times assumed to exist between physics and 
metaphysics, between the scientific temper and 
a religious trust, as though the two, science 
and religion, like the Samaritans with their 
law only, and the Jews with the prophets also, 
have no dealings with each other. I have been 
emphasizing the fact, therefore, that in actual 
living and thinking they can not help having 
dealings with one another. To set up either 
a mechanistic or a spiritual interpretation of 
ourselves on the single base of either were to 
raise a broken shaft and to leave no possibil- 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 27 

ity of the completing arch. We, indeed, with 
our present knowledge are not able to appre- 
hend the simplification of the dualism of mat- 
ter and mind in their higher unity, but even 
in our partial knowledge we may trace some 
converging lines between the natural and the 
spiritual, and follow these structural lines up far 
enough to render reasonable our faith that there 
is beyond our sight some overarching unity. 

Our work, then, in natural theology as thus 
far set forth, alike as learners and as interpret- 
ers of meanings, is at once humble and ex- 
alted; it warns us against the presumption 
either of a final science or a dogmatic philos- 
ophy; it bids us cultivate "the modesty of 
true science" and the aspiration of a spiritual 
faith. It calls us once again in this genera- 
tion to a positive work of construction, inas- 
much as natural theology, though but as a 
child among these building blocks of the crea- 
tion, can nevertheless put together some facts 
according to some meaning; it may match 
lines and letters to some intelligible purpose; 
and as more and more the parts are fitly joined 
together, and word adds meaning to word, the 



28 CONSTRUCTIVE 

belief grows that the whole has significance 
well worth our knowing — perhaps, when we shall 
see it as a whole, a simpler, more human, yet 
diviner meaning than we had thought. 

Let me add a few words concerning the value 
of such scientific studies in natural theology to 
the preacher. The exigencies of his calling ex- 
pose him weekly to the intellectual peril of vague 
thinking and unreal expression. In his sym- 
pathies also at all times his mind must be quick 
to catch the moods of men as a lake does the 
shadows of the passing clouds. He must de- 
sire to imitate the Master in feeling as his own 
the feeling of every home of sorrow. He needs, 
then, more than others to maintain a rigorous 
discipline of clear, consecutive thinking, held 
closely to the facts. He especially must be on 
his guard against that common human infirmity, 
namely, the liability, in thinking, of a sudden 
gaseous expansion of truth at a high tempera- 
ture of feeling. As a social leader he will need 
the mental habit of seeing a wrong felt, or a 
reform proposed, in its large relations, seeing 
it clearly and seeing it whole. And as a relig- 
ious teacher of ideal and spiritual realities, 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 29 

he must keep firm footing on the solid ground 
of nature, while he walks with "looks com- 
mercing with the skies." Allow me to com- 
mend to your use as a most salutary mental 
discipline in exact thinking the study and the 
effort to construct for yourselves a scientific 
natural theology. Schopenhauer speaks of it 
as "a trick often used by him to advantage, sud- 
denly, when a thought especially inspired him, 
to turn over it the ice-cold water of critical 
reflection in order to see whether it would re- 
tain its nature and power." I know of no bet- 
ter way of so doing than to listen to some scien- 
tific lectures; of no more invigorating cold 
bath in its reaction for our idealism, for such 
as are strong enough to bear it, than to take 
a header, for instance, into Loeb's mechanistic 
conception of the contents of the inner life, 
and to come out again into the light of com- 
mon sense. 

But beyond this disciplinary value, which is 
needed, will be the direct spiritual reassurance 
and ever fresh exhilaration which the preacher 
of the word of life may derive from the return 
to nature. 



30 CONSTRUCTIVE 

For him in the increasing illumination of 
scientific knowledge to become able to lay 
hold of great creative principles that run on 
and up from the first pulsations of cosmic 
ether to the garden, the man of the earth 
earthy, the second man of the spiritual spiri- 
tual, even the Lord from heaven, — oh! this is 
to receive from nature herself a new baptism 
of power; and still further to gain some per- 
ception that these same constitutive natural 
principles reach on and on toward worlds un- 
realized as yet; to discover throughout these 
preparatory eras of time the real analogies, 
and consequently true prophecies of the eter- 
nal, and, knowing ourselves in our personal 
transcendence as having part and share in all 
that is going on in God's great universe, to 
wait thus in the expectation of the whole crea- 
tion for the revelation of the sons of God — 
this, this, shall be for us in very truth to lay 
hold of the life that is life indeed. And then, 
with such humble simplicity as grace shall be 
given us to attain in our preaching, sometimes 
it may be permitted us to succeed in doing 
what Jesus himself was always doing, giving 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 31 

to the least and lowliest his own best and high- 
est truth of God; even as he did those two 
great things at once in that hour when he gave 
to the woman at Jacob's Well his own inner 
truth, so high above her thought before, that 
God is spirit, while, at the same time, he told 
her all the things that ever she had done. 



II 

THE METHOD AND PROBLEMS 

TN the preceding lecture it was urged that 
we should seek to understand anew what the 
Spirit hath to say to the churches in the pro- 
gressive revealings of nature. The spoils of 
the natural sciences wait to be utilized by a 
new natural theology. In view of the advances 
of Neo-Darwinism and the fresh contributions 
of science to our knowledge of evolution, the 
Apologetics, so called, of faith need to be re- 
written up to date. Moreover, the reconstruc- 
tion of systematic theology, which is desirable, 
requires a broad and deeply laid foundation in 
natural theology. It is inadvisable to erect 
a theological sky-scraper on foundations that 
are not laid firm in nature. Preachers who 
would minister to the mind of this generation 
need the ever fresh inspiration of what one of 
the ancients called "the Spirit of Education." 

32 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 33 

That there may be in our time a rejuvenes- 
cence of spiritual faith, religion may well go 
out-of-doors, and with all the elemental forces 
around and above it prophesy and say of its 
systems of dogmatics, "Lo, they are very dry. 
Come from the four winds, O Breath, and 
breathe upon these slain systems of dogmatics, 
that they may live." 

I proceed next to indicate the method and 
the range of the problems which natural theol- 
ogy has to pursue. 

We exist somewhere midway in the course 
of nature, our beginnings hidden in the depths 
of the measureless past ages before ever our 
members were fashioned, and the end of us 
beyond our earth-time as yet all unrevealed. 
Our knowledge — a little span and narrow circle 
of it — lies in the midst of the flood of the years. 
But, be it small or great, so far as it goes it has 
firm footing on fact, and it is real knowledge. 
It is our experience of what is; and if we are 
true to that, as it is here and now, we may 
trust the universe ultimately not to disown us; 
neither from the beginning nor the end shall 
come denial of what is now given in our per- 



34 CONSTRUCTIVE 

sonal being, and realized in the personal life 
as having immortal worth. 

"Nature never did betray 
The heart that loved her." 

In determining, then, the method of construc- 
tive natural theology we have first of all to decide 
the point from which our inquiry shall start, 
near which end of our knowledge in the midst 
of things we shall begin. For no difference 
between older and more recent methods of 
philosophic thinking is more marked than just 
this — the opposite points of their departure. 
The philosophy of nature of the earlier nine- 
teenth century started from the transcenden- 
tal view of nature, as Schelling would discover 
the ideal content that exists in things, or as 
Fichte's subjective philosophy regarded na- 
ture from the point of view of the beholder, 
making nature a looking-glass of himself. On 
the other hand, the more modern natural phi- 
losophy, since La Place, starts from the me- 
chanical point of view and seeks to determine 
mathematically the working principles of na- 
ture. Simultaneously with these different phil- 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 35 

osophical views, there grew up the modern nat- 
uralistic school of poetry. 1 These two voices, 
the naturalist's and the poet's, are heard in 
Goethe; but of all poets Wordsworth, of whom 
it is said that he never made a mistake in his 
descriptions of natural objects, has been the in- 
terpreter of the interaction of man and nature, 
as he himself has called it: 

"An ennobling interchange 
Of action from without and from within, 
The excellence, pure function and best power 
Both of the object seen and eye that sees." 

The task for natural theology to accomplish 
might in one aspect be described in these words 
of Wordsworth concerning the poet's power: 
"He considers man and nature as essentially 
adapted to each other, and the mind of man 
as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most 
interesting qualities of nature. . . . Poetry is the 
breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is 
the impassioned expression which is in the coun- 
tenance of all science." 2 This is what the new 

1 See Merz, "Hist, of European Thought," vol. Ill, pp. 
546 sq. 
2 Preface to second edition of the "Lyrical Ballads." 



36 CONSTRUCTIVE 

natural theology shall do: interpret the spiri- 
tual expression which is on the very countenance 
of true science. 

Where, then, did I just ask, shall we start 
in search of the ultimate meanings of ourselves 
and our world? I answer, we are to begin 
neither with Schelling's philosophy nor with 
Wordsworth's poetry of nature. Neither shall 
we go back to Kant and throw the metaphysi- 
cian's net of categories over all things, to find 
that the "thing in itself" always slips through 
its meshes. We must make at the start the 
candid admission that the mechanists have 
fought a winning battle with the vitalists; 
they have traced the mechanical connections 
throughout nature even into the complicated 
operations of their own brains. This exten- 
sion of the mechanistic conception on the sci- 
entific side compels us, if we would save our 
theological souls, to go down ourselves with 
them to first principles and to reconstruct our 
psychology and our religious philosophy anew 
from the bottom up. Now, when the modern 
mind calls again the leaders to lead in Israel, 
if the schools of divinity should abide in their 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 37 

cozy traditions and their comfortable philos- 
ophies, like Reuben they would deserve the 
scorn of Deborah, that valiant mother in Israel: 
"Why satest thou among the sheepfolds to 
hear the pipings for the flocks?" Upon their 
honor as teachers of men who would know, the- 
ological leaders are called forth to search for 
the beginnings of their faiths as far back into 
the realities of nature as any knowledge can 
possibly go. Here, at Yale, a school of religion 
would have no right or reason to stand in the 
midst of a university, facing its laboratories, 
unless it could write over its portals the in- 
scription: "All nature-searchers welcome here. ,, 
Yes, but you may say, the line of knowledge, 
as you have called it, on the scientific side is a 
short one; are we to be tethered in our belief 
to what the scientists positively know? The 
answer is forthcoming: speculative thought, 
pushing out from either end of the known line, 
the scientific or the religious, the subphysical 
or the metaphysical end, is as necessary to a 
man of full-grown intelligence as one of those 
simple questions which we know not how to 
answer is necessary to a little child. But spec- 



38 CONSTRUCTIVE 

ulative thought in either direction beyond the 
known is rational only when it proceeds from 
the same principle, viz., its true extension in 
the same line as the known, that is, its real 
analogy. In other words, in both cases, on 
the scientific or the philosophical side, alike in 
working theories and in living faiths, as science 
reaches backward toward natural beginnings, 
or philosophy presses on toward final causes, 
the degrees of probability to be given to the 
views of origins or of destiny will depend upon 
the same common measure, viz., the extension of 
thought out into the unknown in the same di- 
rection as the line of experience and knowledge 
already laid down in experience and knowledge. 
It is by this rule that a real and consequently 
fruitful analogy is to be distinguished from a 
fanciful and barren resemblance. The trueness, 
let me repeat, either of a scientific working 
theory or a living belief, to the line or curve of 
experience already attained is the common 
measure of its probability, the same rule of 
reasonableness by which it is to be measured. 
And they who use this method freely at the 
one end of the scale have least of all right to 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 39 

deny the same principle of reasoning at the 
other end of it. Our little life here may be 
compared to a section of a curve the elements 
of which are calculable; the arc which it spans 
is full enough to render possible some deter- 
mination of its constants, and consequently 
some conception of the vaster sweep of its cur- 
vature, immeasurable though that may be. 
Hence a physical science or experimental psy- 
chology that shall successfully determine any 
elements or constants of our present experience 
is to be welcomed as an aid to the religious ap- 
prehension of the far-reaching significance of our 
personal life. 

If, then, after this experimental method with 
the minimum of antecedent hypothesis, the 
new natural theology shall take up the old 
problems of faith, we shall not begin with 
Kant, but possibly we may come back to 
Kant's reverential awe of the starry heavens 
and the moral law, having dropped on the way 
his phenomenalism, escaping also from the 
dualism of Descartes and avoiding the artifi- 
cial monads of Leibnitz; peradventure to find 
rest for our wearied philosophic feet in a rler- 






f •• *■ 



\ 



1 s 






* 



4 o CONSTRUCTIVE 

sonal realism — if I may thus indicate in a sin- 
gle phrase what a Frenchwoman once asked 
a philosopher to do: "Give me," she said, "your 
philosophy in a single word.'* It would, of 
course, be impossible to condense within the 
compass of these lectures the critical discus- 
sions or to enumerate even the successive facts 
of significance which should be considered in 
the course of the inquiry which has just been 
indicated; nor would I desire by giving you a 
too condensed lecture-tablet to occasion on 
your part any intellectual indigestion. But the 
studious task required by this method of nat- 
ural theology may, at least, be made clear. It 
is simply to hit the trail through nature where 
best we may, and to follow it closely from sign 
to sign as far as we possibly can. 1 

Amid the tangle of modern questionings, a 
student of divinity may feel at times like 
Dante: 

"Midway upon the journey of my life, 
I found myself within a forest dark, 
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.' , 

1 This method I hope to follow through in a volume, now in 
preparation, on the meaning of personality. 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 41 

But, unlike Dante, he may meet no disincar- 
nate spirit to be his guide from sphere to 
sphere. He can, however, notice in the path- 
less forest some mark of seeming insignificance, 
bits of moss, bended boughs, or leafy growth 
on one side, showing whence comes the pre- 
vailing wind or on which side the sunbeams 
fall. He may descry a mark that seems not 
accidental, a blaze on a single tree; looking 
all around and more intently he may see an- 
other, and still another blaze, and wonder if 
these indicate any definite direction; he may 
ere long become confident that he is following 
a real trail and hope to be led out to some 
clear space. To see the signs, to recognize 
them distinctly where they are to be seen, and 
not to give up or to circle around with aimless 
feet as one hopelessly lost in this bewildering 
complexity of things — such is the problem of 
nature and humanity for keen-eyed and strong 
natural theologians. 

Where then farthest back can you hit the 
trail to-day? Not where the science of the 
eighteenth century began; not where the sci- 
ence of yesterday stopped. We can not begin 



42 CONSTRUCTIVE 

the pursuit of natural theology with Herbert 
Spencer's biological definitions, which at best 
are useful only as artificial horizons may be 
in taking one's latitude; nor shall we begin and 
end where Huxley's automaton stands like 
Bunyan's Mr. Facing-Both-Ways; nor can we 
be content to abandon the search with Dar- 
win's accepted principle of natural selection: 
science in the Darwinian direction has already 
penetrated farther into the evolutionary tangle 
of conflicting forces, and other factors hold up 
to observation their signs of meaning. 

At what point, then, does science enable us 
to get a positive clutch on anything? Well, 
just at present the last jumping-ofT place of 
physics into the unknown and the inconceiv- 
able is the electron. Whatever that may prove 
to be, from wherever it originated, evidently 
it came to do something worth doing. It is 
certainly a very active, and apparently a quite 
useful intermediary between the ether of space 
and the molecules of matter. At once it makes 
its importance felt; it is the first mover in a 
stupendous work of world-making. Does it 
give any hint of further meaning? Inspect it 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 43 

more closely. You will not expect me to at- 
tempt to expound the new working theory of 
matter, which is mathematically intricate, and 
which is still only in initial stages of verifica- 
tion. When the physicist catches the electron 
in his laboratory, our interest lies in putting 
to it the same old question: What sign showest 
thou ? What sign, if any, of former things be- 
fore you, or pointing toward things to come? 
We remember that Clerk Maxwell once told 
us that the atom has "the essential character 
of a manufactured article. ,, 1 Now these self- 
illuming radium atoms, and these last electric 
newcomers into observation, tell us something 
more intimately of the structure of the ma- 
terials of which the worlds are made. We are 
informed that "the existence of masses, which 
are much smaller than that of the smallest of 
the atoms of known substances, has been de- 
monstrated in the surest possible manner, and 
by purely physical methods. " 2 These infini- 
tesimals, we are told, with their electric charge, 
smaller a thousand times than the atom of 

1 "Life of J. Clerk Maxwell," p. 359. 

2 Righi, A., "Modern Theory of Physical Phenomena," p. 127. 



44 CONSTRUCTIVE 

hydrogen, are the original building-stones of 
the heavens and the earth. 1 Moreover, we are 
taught that these electrons would seem to be 
the elements of construction of the architecture 
of the atoms. Therefore it may be admitted 
that a material atom is nothing but a system 
composed of a certain number of positive and 
an equal number of negative electrons, and 
that the latter, or at least some of them, move 
about the remaining portion like satellites 2 — 
a miniature this in an atom of a solar system. 
Nor is this all that is to be noted. The mass 
of these infinitesimal particles is measurable, 
yet it is found to vary at different degrees of 
temperature; it is hence inferred that its mass 
is in part at least more apparent than real. 
Thus substantiality, as we ordinarily conceive 
of it, to the scientific eye seems to vanish from 
this first estate of matter. Only a few years 
ago natural philosophy assumed the existence 
of cosmic ether, and atoms of ponderable mat- 
ter; from these it attempted to work out a 
mechanical explanation of all physical phe- 

1 Rutherford estimates them at 1,700 times smaller. 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 45 

nomena. 1 Now, taking a fresh start from the 
ether and the electrons, it seeks to form pon- 
derable matter itself out of these imponder- 
ables, or semi-imponderables. It succeeds, per- 
haps, in conceiving more satisfactorily in what 
the electrical current consists, but we know no 
better what the electrons are which electricity 
is a current of; nor have we discovered how 
the primeval cosmic ether ever gave them birth; 
by what strain and travail of primitive nature 
were brought forth these electrons by whose 
unseen hands the heavens have been made. 
The same authority in physics whose words I 
have just been citing introduces his exposition 
of the "modern theory of physical phenomena " 
with the remark that, in spite of the mystery 
of electric atoms, "this new theory may per- 
haps acquire not a little importance in the fu- 
ture, even from the philosophic point of view, 
since it points out a new method of consider- 
ing the structure of ponderable matter, and 
tends to bring back to a single origin all the 
phenomena of the physical world" (p. xiii). 
Now that is precisely what I would say it is 
1 Ib.,f. 144. 



46 CONSTRUCTIVE 

the business of natural theology to do; to ob- 
serve what discovered things tend toward; 
what nature from the least to the greatest 
shows as its prevailing tendency: this is our 
problem all the way along, to follow the trail, 
and not to lose it. These electrons in them- 
selves prove nothing, but what is their sign? 
To the physicist just quoted, they bear the 
sign of one source: they bring to his notice a 
hint of monism, although that may not, by 
itself alone, lead so far as monotheism. 

Observe some other marks, which will become 
more noticeable as we pass on. These primal 
invisibles of matter show at once a remarkable 
aptitude for combination; and fitness to en- 
ter into combinations characterizes further the 
molecules charged with their attractions. The 
molecules no sooner exist than they seem dis- 
posed to enter into a building trust. Out of 
the scattered, competing elements of space the 
sun has certainly formed a powerful monopoly 
of heat and light, and on the whole a benevo- 
lent despotism. In this elemental fitness for 
combination a sign is given; what order and 
government of the heavens and earth shall 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 47 

come of it, only the age-long history of the 
creation shall determine; but this original 
adaptability of matter to take form and to 
develop systems, is prophetic of an ordered 
universe and its well-being. These atoms of 
our earth contain reminiscence of their com- 
mon source, and our fair world is the fulfilment 
of their prescience of a kingdom greater than 
themselves which was to come. Had there 
been an intelligent spirit to observe these atomic 
elements when they first appeared in space, 
there would have been potential significance 
enough in their coming to have caused such 
intelligence to look forward with expectant 
wonder to behold some structural idea taking 
shape and substance in some vast construction. 
While now we stand gazing into the heavens, to 
us is revealed the glory of the infinitely great; 
as we look down into the dust beneath our feet 
we may understand the infinite significance of 
the infinitely small. 

I pause for a moment at this point to dwell on 
a new phase of the old problem which is opened 
by what since Arrhenius's work may be re- 



4 8 CONSTRUCTIVE 

garded as the science of cosmic-physics. Some 
seventy years ago that acute logician Whewell, 
in his Bridgewater treatise entitled "Astronomy 
and General Physics Considered with Refer- 
ence to Natural Theology,'' availed himself of 
the science of his day to show that "a great 
number of quantities and laws appear to have 
been selected in the construction of the universe; 
and that, by the adjustment to each other of 
the magnitudes and laws thus selected, the 
constitution of the world is what we find it, and 
is fitted for the support of vegetables and ani- 
mals in a manner in which it could not have 
been, if the properties and quantities of the 
elements had been different from what they 
are." * Since Darwin biology has been so pre- 
occupied with the role of natural selection in the 
organic world that this prior question of the 
evolution of the inorganic world to be the en- 
vironment to which life, when it came, might 
fit itself,ihas been generally a neglected prob- 
lem; but the whole biological problem runs 
directly back into it. Lockyer and others have 
found spectroscopic evidence of several succes- 

1 Fifth edition, p. 141. 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 49 

sive stages in the development of the stellar 
universe, and, as the different color indicates, 
the evolution of elements in the stars is now 
an open question. We have thus in the de- 
velopment of the inorganic world what has 
been called "delayed utility' '; the successive 
stages of inorganic evolution bear the broad 
mark of prospective utility. To the pre-exist- 
ence of elemental forms and potencies we owe 
our existence here in this room just now; and 
apart from us all these were not made perfect. 
Recently a physiological chemist, Professor 
Henderson of Harvard, has put to biology anew 
this question concerning "the fitness of the 
environment. ,, He simplifies the problem, and 
thus renders it more scientifically determinable, 
by narrowing it to three chief elementary con- 
ditions of the matter fit for life on the one 
hand, and to three distinctive characters of life 
on the other hand; 1 and then he seeks to dis- 
cover from the physical and chemical point of 
view on what law or formative principle the 
anticipatory development of the former became 

Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen (with carbon compounds); and 
complexity, regulation, metabolism of life. 



5 o CONSTRUCTIVE 

so peculiarly fitted for the adaptation to it of 
the later evolution of life. He reaches this 
result: "Given matter, energy, and the result- 
ing necessity that life shall be a mechanism, 
the conclusion follows that the atmosphere of 
solid bodies does actually provide the best of 
all possible environments for life." 1 He ex- 
cludes mere contingency in his endeavor to 
find the formative principle of the fitness of 
the environment. "There is, in truth," he 
says, "not one chance in countless millions of 
millions that the many unique properties of 
carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and especially 
of their stable compounds water and carbonic 
acid, which chiefly make up the atmosphere of 
a new planet, should simultaneously occur in 
three elements otherwise than through the 
operation of a natural law which somehow con- 
nects them together. There is no greater prob- 
ability that these unique properties should be 
without due cause uniquely favorable to the 
organic mechanism. These are no mere acci- 
dents; an explanation is to seek. It must be 
admitted, however, that no explanation is at 
'Fitness of the Environment, p. 273. 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 51 

hand." He asks: "How does it come about that 
each and all of these many unique properties 
should be favorable to the organic mechanism, 
should fit the universe for life? And for the 
answer to this question existing knowledge pro- 
vides, I believe, no clew" (pp. 278 sq.). So 
chemistry hands over this promise to natural 
theology. Can it suggest a clew? 

That clew, as religious students and teachers, 
we are to search out. If we are to meet]the mod- 
ern mind, we shall not be satisfied by bringing 
a ready-made answer from some once living 
volume of philosophical theism now laid at 
rest in the reference-library tomb; still less by 
preaching with vociferous authority from lec- 
ture note-books; not by intellectual indolence 
shall professional teachers of religion succeed 
in apprehending the essential meanings of the 
investigator's facts or in relieving "the torture 
of an intellect pondering the world problem" in 
the pew. We, ourselves, must be strong enough 
to have endured the pain of thinking; how can 
we hope in our preaching to help the suffering 
of the intellect which another may feel, if never 
in our theological training or ministry we have 
first felt ourselves the pain of thinking? 



52 CONSTRUCTIVE 

To him to whom 

"The meanest flower that blows can give 
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," 

the clew to the world problem, which the sci- 
entist seeks in vain, may be disclosed; yet not 
to him without wrestling of mind with the un- 
known One in nature until the day break, and 
the nameless One is known in the inner reveal- 
ing of his experience of himself, his Christ, and 
his God. 

A course of natural theology, according to 
the method just outlined, would lead from 
physical science next into general biology, and 
from that on through modern psychology; a 
critical and detailed review of recent researches 
and discussions in these sciences would be re- 
quired for a thorough construction of a new 
natural theology; a cursory survey only of 
the rich materials to be gathered and analyzed 
for this purpose would far exceed our present 
limits. My immediate object is not so much 
to present my own conclusions from such stud- 
ies, but rather to urge the conviction that these 
sciences are rich in fresh material to be worked 
over in religious thought, and that they should 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 53 

be deemed a necessary part of a good theolog- 
ical education; and I would point out the way 
in which such inquiries should be followed 
through, as far as reason and scientific imagi- 
nation can follow them. 

A few general observations are at this point 
not unneeded. A caution should be given to 
the public in general, and to some preachers in 
particular, against a too ready acceptance of 
newspaper or popular science, excepting, of 
course, any signed articles by recognized au- 
thorities. When I notice sometimes the scien- 
tific news and still more remarkable headlines 
in the press, as well as the reports that emanate 
occasionally through press bureaus from some 
laboratories, in which experimental work is 
often magnified into great discoveries, I am re- 
minded of what Erasmus said of certain specu- 
lations in vogue in his day: "With such specu- 
lations nature must be mightily amused." 

In answer to an inquiry of mine, what course 
in science should be recommended to theological 
students in their preparation to preach, Pro- 
fessor Chittenden, of the Sheffield Scientific 
School at Yale, once wrote a letter advising 



54 CONSTRUCTIVE 

for the curriculum of a divinity school a course 
in general biology. That should not be left, 
in my opinion, entirely to the student's frag- 
mentary reading, or to the remarks of a pass- 
ing lecturer, but examination in general biology 
should be required of candidates for the degree 
of Bachelors in Divinity. Let nothing here be 
said in disparagement of knowledge of the con- 
struction of the language of the law and the 
prophets, or of the root-meanings of the w.ords 
in which the Lord conversed with his disciples; 
but who are we to preach the gospel of life to 
the people, if we know little or nothing of the 
grammar of the language of the Ancient of days, 
which is never a dead language, but which is 
the word new every morning of the living One ? 
One thing needs also to be said to prevent 
religious people from falling into needless panic 
of faith in view of occasional claims of over- 
confident magazine science. We should bear in 
mind that biology, strictly speaking, has to 
do directly with living matter, not with an ab- 
stract conception of life. Vital characters come 
under observation as connected with matter, 
and as such the more that can be found out 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 55 

about them, physically and chemically, the bet- 
ter. It is, for instance, primarily of scientific 
interest, but not of religious concern, to find 
out whether or not, as the schoolmen believed, 
and as biologists do not now hold, life may 
spring spontaneously from any heap of refuse. 
We may never know, it would be a scientific joy 
could we discover, just how, under what con- 
ditions, matter acquired the properties which 
are distinctively vital. And if by any possibil- 
ity we should ever become able, through more 
subtle chemical knowledge, from existing ma- 
terials to start new life into motion, as Loeb 
and others have succeeded in actuating the ex- 
isting egg-cell; in such further triumph of sci- 
ence we should only have acquired the power 
of thinking another of God's thoughts after 
him. There are, however, two sides of the 
biological shield. Descartes began a long dis- 
cussion when he attempted to find a physical 
explanation of vital phenomena, but as a phi- 
losopher Descartes was far from being a mech- 
anist. He said: "One thinks metaphysically, 
but one lives and acts physically." At pres- 
ent the long-continued controversy between vi- 



56 CONSTRUCTIVE 

talism and mechanism seems to have come to 
a pause very much where Descartes left it; 
this is the biological paradox: life is mechanical, 
yet the mechanical is not all of life. The bio- 
logical paradox, as I would call it, may be re- 
duced to Lotze's maxim: "How universal, with- 
out exception, is the extent, and at the same 
time how subordinate is the significance of the 
part which mechanism has to play in the build- 
ing of the world." * Similarly, observe also the 
caution which Professor Ernst Mach gives against 
the danger of using the concepts of physics as 
identical with reality: "We, too, should beware 
lest the intellectual machinery, employed in the 
representation of the world on the stage of 
thought, be regarded as the basis of the real 
world." 2 

It is true that, as against mechanistic expla- 
nations of vital phenomena, the new vitalism of 
Driesch and others has still tenable ground left 
on some of the properties of living matter. A 
cursory enumeration of the chief characters of 



1 "Mikrokosmos," I, s. xv. 

*"Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung," p. 476; Eng. Tr. 
Science and Mechanics." p. 505. 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 57 

life that resist compression into a cast-iron me- 
chanical conception, is all that our present limits 
permit; only after a critical study can their 
vital significance be philosophically estimated. 
Among these properties is a certain self-affirm- 
ing energy of the organism. It asserts and 
maintains itself in relation to its environment. 
This is something more than the inertia of a 
body, or the structural resistance of a metal to 
a strain; it is an organic capacity to maintain 
itself as a whole by changing to some extent 
its relations to its external conditions, and this 
organic adaptability by means of which life 
survives is not altogether reducible to equa- 
tions of purely physical stresses. It is more 
than mere stability of structure, however it 
may be explained. Thus Ostwald rightly ob- 
serves that under changes of temperature "life 
affirms a certain condition, although the influ- 
ences of the surroundings change," as water 
does not. "The organism reacts actively, the 
inorganic passively." He also has happily char- 
acterized life as "a lamp that renews the oil 
which it uses." 1 Another peculiar character of 

1 "Vorlesungen iiber Nat. Phil.," pp. 314-316. 



58 CONSTRUCTIVE 

living matter is the directive power of organ- 
isms over their own reactions and motions. 
To a large extent these seemingly purposive ac- 
tions among the lower organisms may be re- 
duced to so-called tropisms, or movements to 
be understood as chemical and physical reac- 
tions; as, for example, the flight of moths to- 
ward a candle is to be regarded as a result of 
unsymmetrical simulation of the light to which 
their motion is a responsive adjustment. But 
some biologists are not ready to admit that the 
behavior even of unicellular organisms can be 
so easily and entirely explained without the 
recognition of some directive responsiveness of 
the organism. 1 The capacity of directive re- 
sponsiveness, which is traceable according to 
Jennings' studies in the behavior of lower or- 
ganisms, becomes a specific capacity of animal 
life, and assumes the character of a psycholog- 
ical fact in the higher stages of evolution. 

Together with other vital properties, the or- 
ganism acquires the character of educability. 
Living matter in the course of its development 
shows itself to be educable matter. The or- 

1 See Jennings, H. L., "The Behavior of Lower Organisms." 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 59 

ganism learns by trial and error; it is taught 
through acquired experience. 

Still another striking mark of the organic is 
its regenerative power. This characteristic is 
generally admitted to be one of the unique 
features of life, most unlike any possible func- 
tions of machines, such as we may make. In 
some of the lower organisms, within certain 
limits, a single part has power to reproduce the 
entire organism; a certain regenerative energy 
therefore seems to be diffused through the whole 
body. Moreover, the organism as a whole 
seems to have some regenerative control over 
its parts. If it is merely a machine, it is a 
machine having this twofold capacity; it can 
restore a lost or broken part, and a part of it 
can remake the whole of it. "A very strange 
sort of a machine," remarks Driesch, "which 
is the same in all its parts." The farthest our 
mechanics has gone is to manufacture machines 
with exactly interchangeable parts. A curious 
peculiarity also has been noticed by Driesch, 
which he calls "retro-difFerentiation," by which 
he designates this remarkable procedure: in 
the process of restoring an injured or lost part, 



60 CONSTRUCTIVE 

some organisms have been observed to discard 
a first-attempt piece, and to replace it by a 
new part which fits better. 1 This resembles 
very much a trial process in some efforts of the 
organism to repair itself. 

Passing by several specialized qualities of 
living matter, another organic character may 
be mentioned as unique — the power of making 
preparation for future contingencies. 

In a great variety of ways this character is 
displayed, not only in animal instincts and 
habits that lead to laying up a store of food 
for future use, but even more curiously in some 
instances of anticipatory provision for the bene- 
fit of offspring. This consists not simply of 
the preparation which the parent may instinc- 
tively make for its progeny, but provisions seem 
to have been subtly wrought by nature herself 
into the very growth and structure of organic 
forms, by means of which contingencies of 
which the parents could have had no experi- 
ence are foreseen and provided for; not a few 
such instances of organic prescience might be 
cited from descriptive natural histories. In 

1 lb., vol. I, p. 163. 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 61 

the embryonic development of some species, 
biologists have noticed "structures which form 
no organic part of the young, yet which at the 
same time indicate accurately what the young 
will need at some future time. ,, For example, 
there is a certain shark-like fish (Chimcera C. 
colliei), the egg of which is contained in a cap- 
sule constructed with apparent prevision of the 
future growth and needs of the progeny. By 
ten different characters "the egg-capsule was 
found to be specialized, i. e., adapted for the 
embryo at a late stage of development. . . . 
(i)The capsule ' foresees' with startling exact- 
ness the size and shape of the young fish when 
many months hence it comes to hatch out, and 
(2) it provides a series of progressive modifica- 
tions adapted to the developing physiological 
needs of the young." The biologist who has 
observed these corresponding characters which 
have thus been acquired in two distinct courses 
of development, computes the chances for two 
such favorable coincident variations to be as 
one in a million; and for three in succession 
as one in a billion. He says: "Natural selec- 
tion of fortuitous variations is, accordingly, 



62 CONSTRUCTIVE 

clearly valueless in explaining the evolution of 
the present capsule. The capsule of Chimcera 
must stand, I believe, as an instance of deter- 
minate direction. " * 

The argument from these and other special 
characters of living matter should not be 
pressed too far. They are not proofs of any 
theory of the nature of life, but they are in- 
dications of some further meaning to be dis- 
cerned. They do not disprove mechanistic con- 
ceptions, so far as it is possible to discover 
the mechanical means and principles in the 
constitution and operation of organic nature, 
but they are indicative of the presence of other 
factors of evolution, and they open the possi- 
bility of their working in and through known 
chemical and physical conditions. They have 
further significance to be recognized in scien- 
tific investigation; what their final meaning is 
may be determined only as we endeavor to in- 
terpret them in relation to other known facts 
of higher significance, as we may succeed phil- 
osophically to apprehend them in the "to- 

1 Bashford Dean in Biol. Bulletin, Woods' Holl, vol. VII, 1904, 
pp. 105 sq. 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 63 

gether" of nature. As signs of a rational order 
in nature such characters once so impressed 
Huxley that he said: "A course of organic ev- 
olution is a materialized logical process. " To 
which a Scotch biologist added the remark: 
"Evolution is a materialized ethical process." 
And an American biologist concludes a study 
of regenerative phenomena with these words: 
"Something more is included in these phe- 
nomena, I think, than can be explained by 
simple physical interaction, or by chemical in- 
fluences. . . . The process that takes place sug- 
gests that something like an intelligent process 
must be at work." In true Aristotelian fashion 
he observes, "The form controls the material, 
and it is not to be physically explained." l 

The fundamental question between a ma- 
terialistic and a spiritualistic conception of the 
organic world is not thought through if we 
stop with the conclusion that living matter 
manifests characters and performs work unlike 
any artificial machines. Professor Loeb ad- 
mits that "the fact that the machines which 
can be created by man do not possess the power 

l T. H. Morgan, "Biological Lectures," Woods' Holl, 1898, p. 
266. 



64 CONSTRUCTIVE 

of automatic development, self-preservation 
and reproduction, constitutes for the present a 
fundamental difference between living machines 
and artificial machines." He says: "Living 
organisms may be called chemical machines, in- 
asmuch as the energy for their work and func- 
tions is derived from chemical processes, and in- 
asmuch as the material from which the living 
machines are built must be formed through 
chemical processes." 1 He holds that nothing 
contradicts the possibility that these living 
chemical machines may be artificially con- 
structed. He would offset the chances against 
the natural evolution of living machines by the 
probabilities that an innumerable number of 
failures must have occurred in nature's con- 
structions, while we know only the fortunate 
successes. 2 When hard pressed with difficulties 
the mechanical theory can always take refuge 
in Loeb's saving clause, "for the present," and 
answer that in the experiments of countless ages 
nature may have turned out some surprisingly 
fine products. 

Moreover, the fundamental question of the 

1 "Dynamics of Living Matter," p. I. 
'"Mechanistic Conception of Life," pp. 24 sq. 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 65 

meaning of life is not thought through, if the 
reasoning stops with the apparent specific dis- 
tinctions between inorganic and living matter. 
There must be one measure of value and the 
same final interpretation for both. Natural 
theology puts itself at stake on a side issue, if 
it would risk all on the assumption of a creative 
break between the two. Loeb may rightly re- 
ply that if, as he holds, the durable chemical 
elements are only the product of blind forces, 
then he is justified in affirming, "there is no 
reason for conceiving otherwise the durable sys- 
tems in living nature." 

The search for the real meaning of the world 
must follow things through as one connected 
course, and the reasoning must not stop abruptly 
at any part; only so far as we can gain a world- 
view in which all the parts are seen in their 
correlations, and when taken together as con- 
stituting a rational whole, shall we gain rea- 
sonable assurance that our thought apprehends 
the reality of being, that we know indeed, though 
as yet but in part. Here we may apply the old 
maxim of the Greeks, and beyond all the me- 
chanical means and principles of nature, "Look 



66 CONSTRUCTIVE 

to the end." The values of the end-product 
may tell the whole story of nature; what is the 
final product like — is it godlike? What is our 
personal life worth living for? By whatever 
mechanical means or elementary courses, has 
something eventuated which has value not 
mathematically calculable, something qualita- 
tively good besides being materially well put 
together? The true interpretation will come 
back from the end of the whole story. Which 
is the explanation of the other — the material 
of the mental, the mechanical of the ethical; 
or is the end-result of mind and moral value 
the interpretation of all that has been before it 
from the beginning? 

At this point, therefore, in a natural theology 
that would follow closely the way of nature's 
progressive self-revelation, we are content sim- 
ply to say that these significant phenomena of 
both inorganic and living matter, which we 
have thus rapidly surveyed, are not in them- 
selves proofs of any theory of nature, but that 
they give an impression of thoughtfulness in 
the constitution and processes of nature, and 
that they are suggestive of some immanent, 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 67 

determinate direction in evolution, although not 
by themselves finally demonstrative of intel- 
ligent guidance. The presence of some "un- 
known factor" in nature is everywhere to be 
felt; that factor seems to indicate some energy 
of mind in forming matter, an energizing that 
is superhuman, but not necessarily supernat- 
ural. By whatever means wrought out, nature 
seems to have been first thought out. For 
the real and conclusive interpretation of evolu- 
tion the last question to be determined is: 
whether of every living creature the prophet 
Ezekiel's vision holds true or not; whether the 
mechanic who sees the wheels only, and figures 
out mathematically the laws of their motions, 
sees all there is within the wheels to be known; 
or whether the vision also of the Spirit within 
the wheels is true insight, and their higher law 
is, "Whithersoever it moves they move." 

The next part of the path which from sign 
to sign of meaning I would point out will lead 
us to higher ground, and leave us before the 
supreme fact in nature of the personality of 
the Christ. 



Ill 

CHRIST AS FINAL FACT OF NATURE 

TJEFORE leaving the biological field and 
approaching the subject of this lecture, 
I am asked to consider a question which may 
remain in some minds. Those who are accus- 
tomed to regard life as something wholly apart, 
manifesting a distinct vital force, will at once 
say: If, with the biologists we are to speak 
strictly of living matter, should we not also 
speak of thinking matter; and if so, when the 
matter goes, does everything go with it, and 
what of us would be left? Well, that is very 
much the way in which years ago Pascal in 
one of his profound thoughts did speak — it is 
a famous passage: "Man is but a reed, the 
weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. 
It is not necessary that the entire universe 
arm itself to crush him. A breath of air, a 
drop of water suffices to kill him. But were 

68 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 69 

the universe to crush him, man would still be 
more noble than that which kills him, because 
he knows that he dies, and the universe knows 
nothing of the advantage it has over him" 
(ch. ii, x). In the living matter, in the think- 
ing reed, is contained the potency and the 
meaning of the world. 

Besides what was urged at the close of the 
last lecture, in a somewhat different way let 
me put the answer which in accordance with 
biological science may be given to this ques- 
tion. It may be stated more concretely as 
follows: Here is a loaf of bread, we will say, 
existing to be digested by a man. Suppose 
the universe likewise to be given us to be un- 
derstood or mentally digested; there is this 
difference, however: when a loaf of bread is 
before us to be examined, we are outside of it; 
we are, that is, philosophically speaking, tran- 
scendental to the loaf, and we may find out 
who made it. But we are inside the universe, 
and it is inside us; to know what it is, and 
what we mean, we must take ourselves as im- 
manent in and parts of it. We may not hold 
it up before us, and look outside of it for its 



7 o CONSTRUCTIVE 

Maker. The older natural theology took up 
the world-problem, like Paley's watch, as some- 
thing external which the observer found to 
examine; modern science does not take up the 
problem in that way. Our position, as scien- 
tifically conceived, resembles that which the 
watch might be imagined to assume if it had 
somehow become conscious of itself and won- 
dered what it was, and what the time meant 
that it seemed to be keeping with every tick. 
Our living, our thinking, to put the com- 
parison broadly, is as though the yeast in the 
bread, or the enzyme in its digestion, had be- 
come aware of itself and its action, and won- 
dered what it was all for; or as though the 
mainspring in the watch, becoming conscious 
of its energy, began to speculate concerning 
what all the mechanism around it meant. This 
is our position and our problem of knowledge. 
How, then, does the scientist attack this prob- 
lem of the world's knowledge of itself in his 
knowing it? He replies, it is for us to investi- 
gate how it works, what it is made of, and how 
the things put together in it behave toward 
one another. And he has been finding that 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 71 

out. He is learning every day something new 
as to how things work, and work together. 
That is what Professor Loeb did when he 
started up an unfertilized egg, and, exhilarated 
by his own access of knowledge, jumped to the 
conclusion that some day we may know it all; 
very much as Democritus of old once said, "I 
am about to speak of all things." The biolo- 
gists, a laborious multitude of them, are search- 
ing farther and deeper, and at every step they 
find more chemistry and more physics; but 
they do not find any other specific force in 
their analysis of the phenomena of life. Thus, 
Mr. Thomas B. Osborn, at the experiment sta- 
tion here in our city, for many years has been in- 
dustriously picking out different proteins from 
grains of wheat and other foodstuffs, and trying 
them with interesting and valuable results on 
white rats; and with each result of analysis 
he finds further intricate problems of physio- 
logical chemistry to be worked out. Slowly 
but surely positive science is extending our 
knowledge over the field of vital phenomena; 
it is an indefinite regress of knowledge in this 
direction; but less and less with this exten- 



72 CONSTRUCTIVE 

sion of knowledge grows the space where any 
such specific energy as a vital force may be 
discovered. Indeed, the biologists generally no 
longer trouble themselves about it any more 
than we do about ghosts. What then? Is it 
all over with us? Is the discovered mecha- 
nism of the universe nothing but materialism? 
Do the mathematicians compel us, as Mrs. 
Browning puts it, to apprehend God himself 

"As the bare result 
Of what his hand materially has made, 
Expressed in such an algebraic sign 
Called God; — that is, to put it otherwise, 
They add up nature to a naught of God, 
And cross the quotient." 

Nay; the very success of our knowledge of 
the mechanism of nature is the failure of an 
interpretation of it as materialism. It excludes 
any fortuitous explanation, and compels ac- 
ceptance of some rational principle in its inter- 
pretation. The more the working parts are 
understood, the less as a whole does the mech- 
anism explain its own existence. The decisive 
point is not that one part is inorganic and 
another organic; it is not the fact that one 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 73 

order of nature sleeps in seeming unconscious- 
ness of itself, while another has awakened to 
awareness of its activities; nor is it the fact 
that, as far as we can see, no breaks or inter- 
ruptions occur in the course of nature: the 
point of decisive significance is the constitutive 
fact of formative motion, of motion taking 
form, of form determining motion; it is the 
wonderful fact that, taken all together, nature 
has significance becoming more significant the 
better we know it, and the more we are learning 
scientifically how all things work together for 
what seems to us to be good; it is the out- 
standing fact that the universe — suns and stars 
and all — just here at least on this little earth, 
has come to awareness of itself in our conscious 
thinking of it: this fact it is which the sciences, 
looking up from their successes, give over for 
interpretation to the man to know who knows 
himself. Among these proteins and enzymes, 
of which his bread of life is made, he has be- 
come aware of the meaning of himself to him- 
self, and in the light of his own being he would 
discern the meaning of his world. In other 
words, it is not the things known, but the know- 



74 CONSTRUCTIVE 

ing them; not the things formed, but the form- 
ing them; not the world apart from thinking, 
but thinking immanent in the world that shall 
yield the secret of the essential truth and being 
of it. As both pupil and heir of all the sciences 
it shall be the burden and the joy of the the- 
ologian of nature to seek for this essential truth 
of being as nature's hidden treasure. 

Aristotle, with his penetrating distinctions 
of matter and form, may help at this point 
to clear up our thinking. When the eminent 
German biologist, Driesch, comes to the cru- 
cial point of his elaborate discussion of the 
"Science and Philosophy of the Organism," 
after all his analysis and systemization of the 
results of biological research, he falls back on 
Aristotle's conception of things that have their 
forms or ends in themselves — their so-called 
entelechies. As a man of science, in his philo- 
sophic interpretation of the organism, he takes 
his final stand on this entelechy of nature, not 
indeed against mechanistic knowledge of vital 
phenomena, but above any materialistic theory 
of the organic world that would reduce it to 
an unintelligible heap of things. 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 75 

To put, then, the whole matter in a single 
antithetic sentence, the first question is not 
how things have happened to get into form, 
but why form ever got into things. And the 
last question is, not for what purpose did things 
get themselves into such good form, but what 
the form actually found to be existent in things 
is good for. In fine, the interpretation of na- 
ture is a question of formative motion at the 
beginning and of human values at the present 
end of evolution. 

In the method of inquiry which I am out- 
lining we should pass next into the domain 
of modern descriptive and genetic psychology. 
But here likewise the literature is too exten- 
sive to permit of a critical review within our 
present limits of the evidential value of the 
facts bearing on our line of reasoning from sign 
to sign of meaning in the course of nature and 
human history. Passing over, therefore, with- 
out so much as a cursory survey this portion of 
the inquiry which the new natural theology 
must thoroughly investigate, we confront the 
last, best-known fact in nature — the final fact 
of personality. Its consummate realization is 
the person of Jesus, the Christ. 



76 CONSTRUCTIVE 

From whatever point in nature or in human 
history we may choose to start, if we follow 
the way through, we come out at length in full 
view of the supernal Christ-fact of personality 
upon this earth, above all others, positive and 
pure as the Jungfrau among the Alps, ascend- 
ing till its summit is lost from sight in the glory 
of the evening cloud. 

Does it seem a venturesome attempt to ap- 
proach the person of the Christ from the na- 
ture side, and to read the meaning of human 
life in the personal consciousness of Jesus ? Yet 
the Son of man has his place and hour in the 
continuity of nature, and his life is moment 
and part of human history. Nature itself leads 
to the consummate Man. And the inner con- 
sciousness of the perfect man throws back its 
light on all that has been before him. So far 
then as we may enter into the self-conscious- 
ness of Jesus, we may enter more deeply into 
the significance of our own life and of the whole 
course of natural development from which we 
have come to be ourselves. Personality, ours 
and his, is to be finally interpreted in the light 
of the Christ of nature, the Christ of history, 
and the Christ of experience. Either part of 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 77 

this interpretation is incomplete without the 
others. Separate these three primary aspects 
of the person of Christ entirely from one an- 
other, and we break the perfect simplicity of 
the Light of the world. 

In pursuing further this inquiry, natural 
theology runs over into revealed; but the 
point of view will be retained; from the nature 
side, and as involved in the course of nature, 
we look to the Christ of history and experience 
as the end and final meaning of all the way of 
evolution. Both the man of science and the 
man of faith have right to stand on holy ground. 
When Moses saw the burning bush, he was a 
natural scientist when he said, "I will turn 
aside now, and see why the bush is not burnt.'' 
Moses was a religious man when from out of 
the midst of the bush he heard God calling 
him, and he hid his face, for he was afraid to 
look upon God. Mrs. Browning says "every 
bush is aflame with God." If, then, we turn 
aside with our science to see how out of the 
midst of the natural there appears a flame so 
divine, we shall find ourselves in a presence 
that is a revealing light in nature, yet as the 



78 CONSTRUCTIVE 

flame that does not consume. Moses quickly 
forgot his question, Why? in that Presence; we 
may the more readily receive the revelation if 
we shall have discerned that the material world 
is made for the indwelling of the spiritual, and 
how naturally from the midst of it the uncon- 
suming flame shines out. It is with such rev- 
erential desire that natural theology approaches 
the holy ground of the Christian theophany, 
and asks what sign does it give? As final lu- 
minous fact in nature, what is the meaning of 
the potential personality of the Christ? 

This, our modern question concerning the 
Christ, is primarily one of dynamics — the dy- 
namic of his mighty personality. 

The fundamental problem of natural science 
concerns energetics: What in the last analysis 
is the energy of nature? whence its source? 
Give me matter and motion, once said a phi- 
losopher, and I could create the world. But 
that is the rub; give us matter in motion, and 
one might imagine how on mechanical principles 
much might be created. But a third postu- 
late would have to be granted in order for us 
to imagine how such a world as ours could have 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 79 

been made: give us matter and motion, and 
also form — form-giving motion — and it would 
be easier to conceive how the world was made. 
All the way along the first and the last ques- 
tion of the philosophy of evolution is the dy- 
namical interrogation, whence and what are 
the potentials of matter, of life, of animal in- 
telligence, of humanity? And with this ques- 
tion at the heart of our scientific knowledge we 
turn to the mighty working of the Son of man, 
the dynamic of the life of the Christ in the 
world. What is its source, its kinetic mani- 
festation in history, its conservation in the 
Christian consciousness? What presence of 
God is this? The yesterdays of creation were 
potential with it; the to-day of the personal 
influence of the Christ knows it supremely; 
the to-morrow of humanity shall fill up the 
measure of this divine dynamic in the history 
of the world. 

The cosmic problem of a divine dynamic 
confronts natural theology when, having still 
on its lips the final question of the sciences, 
it draws near and inquires of the Christ, What 
workest thou? what sign through the centuries 



80 CONSTRUCTIVE 

dost thou give? Think not that lightly or by a 
ministry of unstudious popularity this question 
can be answered to an age that never more 
seriously than now lifts up its supreme doubt to 
the supernal Man. It is the call of the Chris- 
tian ministry above everything else to know 
Jesus Christ and him crucified; to know him 
not only for the man on the street in his strug- 
gle with the world, but to know the Christ for 
the solitary man in the vigil of his intellect 
in the mystery of life; and you can not know 
your Christ, as he waits for men to know him, 
save as you yourself shall first seek to behold 
him, him only, him supremely, as he stands 
in the midst of the sciences, fulfilling all knowl- 
edge in the higher Verilies of his consciousness 
of God. 

In order to gain a clearer appreciation of 
the potential personality of Jesus, one should 
not fail to observe the natural possibilities of 
new influx of power, and of marked acceler- 
ations likewise of spiritual energy at favor- 
able points in a chosen line of descent. A 
cumulative heredity at times will knot threads 
of life together in a strong personality; or, like 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 81 

the sudden mutation in De Vries' primroses, 
creative of a double flower, unexpectedly a 
spiritual genius may blossom out. We are far 
from knowing the full measure of the power of 
mind in and through matter, and the natural 
potency of the human spiritual energy may be 
more dominant and farther reaching than our 
sciences have as yet followed or can verify. 
Psychology of late has been pushing farther 
back the limits of personal experience around 
the whole field of consciousness, throwing it 
open to influences from far and near, from the 
superconscious as well as the subconscious; so 
that one can hardly tell nowadays just where 
he himself in any direction does begin or may 
leave ofF. In very truth we are every moment 
our finite selves in the presence of the infinite 
and the eternal. From a thorough apprecia- 
tion, then, of the immense personal potential 
of man's being, with its future possibilities to 
which our present limitations may not set 
bounds, we are to approach the potential per- 
sonality of Jesus, the Christ. 

We shall thus have learned how, in the cradle 
of natural tendencies and conjunctions, a new 



82 CONSTRUCTIVE 

power may be nurtured, a new will sent forth 
to do some will of God. It is with no irrever- 
ent curiosity, therefore, that natural theology 
will ask what may be said concerning the psy- 
cho-physiological preparation for the advent of 
Jesus. For this purpose those scribes who kept 
the book of his generations may have been 
guided by a more far-sighted wisdom than they 
dreamed, and for our information have wrought 
better than they knew. For to us, children of 
this scientific age, these genealogies give Jesus 
a chosen place in nature's line of promise; they 
serve to bring his spiritual ascendency from his 
birth more profoundly into harmony with nat- 
ural law; not without the coworking of natural 
selective agencies was the way prepared for the 
coming of one who should be born the spiritual 
king among men. 

In this connection a word should not be left 
unsaid concerning the narrative of the virgin 
birth. We leave to the biblical critics the 
question of the origin of that belief; very likely 
it may have been one of the earlier after- 
thoughts of some of his disciples concerning 
their risen Lord — their reflection back upon 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 83 

his nativity of their knowledge of his more 
wondrous life. Nor from our present point of 
view are we concerned just now with the sub- 
stance of the faith underlying the words, "born 
of the Virgin Mary." It lies beyond our prov- 
ince to discuss in passing how rightly we should 
use in our churches the ancient symbols of the 
faith — not, indeed, in slavish literalness, but as 
that great protestant Chillingworth did, when 
he wrote beneath his subscription in the parish 
registry that he signed them as the bonds of 
peace. And with all the associations of art, 
of purity, of prayer, and holy devotion of the 
saints, gathered around that name, the Virgin 
Mary, his would be a reckless iconoclastic hand 
who would strike it from the Christian's com- 
mon creed. 

Natural theology, however, is directly con- 
cerned with the significance of the advent of 
Jesus as a historical fact. Considered in this 
light, it is to be observed that the tradition of 
the virgin birth is neither capable in itself of 
historical proof, nor would it, if provable, by 
itself alone prove anything of indispensable 
value to faith in the spiritual origin of all life, 



84 CONSTRUCTIVE 

or in the Incarnation. It might, on the con- 
trary, add an exceptionable difficulty to the 
belief that Jesus' human heredity was such 
as ours. Whether, indeed, before ever his mem- 
bers were fashioned, as afterward at his bap- 
tism, there may have been an unusual descent 
of the Spirit, an influx of spiritual power which 
is beyond our apprehension, but not beyond 
the capacity of nature to receive — this is mat- 
ter for speculative religious thought. But if 
he is indeed the Christ, whose coming inter- 
prets nature and history, and by whom the 
thoughts of men's hearts are revealed, then he 
must have been a man like us; he could not 
have been the man he was unless he had en- 
tered into the full inheritance of our human 
nature. And surely the life of Jesus showed 
the union and the perfection of both the manly 
and the womanly of his heredity from a line 
of kings and from the mother who was blessed 
among women; for, in his personal authority 
and in his wondrous personal attractiveness, 
he led strong men to leave all and follow him, 
and drew the little child from the midst of 
them to come to him. 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 85 

His disciples tell us nothing of the Master's 
appearance, as we would like to know how he 
looked, wh t light was in his eye, what power 
in his presence, when he spake some of those 
words which, once spoken, have never since 
been forgotten. But from some minor indi- 
cations of his personal impression upon men, 
as well as from what is narrated of the works, 
taxing human endurance, which he did day 
after day, we may infer something concerning 
his perfect physiological preparation, the con- 
summate organization in him of body and mind, 
for the exercise of sustained spiritual energy, 
for the going forth to others of the virtue that 
was in him. The disciples, said Peter, followed 
no cunningly devised fables when they made 
known his power and his presence. His min- 
istry of healing also — a subject which I will not 
now venture to discuss — may bear witness in 
the light of further psychical knowledge of the 
natural to the renewing virtue of the Spirit 
when raised to its highest power in a perfect 
personality. 

Furthermore, in order that we may behold 
Jesus as he is in the midst of natural forces and 



86 CONSTRUCTIVE 

laws, we shall need to study his life in relation 
to whatever historical criticism may enable us 
to know of his immediate environment. In 
this sense biblical criticism, though not an exact 
science, may rightly claim a place among the 
sciences. Natural theology must avail itself 
of these studies likewise in its final effort to 
discover the meaning of personal life in its 
highest realization in the self-consciousness of 
the Christ. Sooner or later, 'to this ultimate 
issue all our knowledges must come out: 
How are we to apprehend ourselves in Christ? 
What is the personal value as it is realized in 
the ideal personality of Christ? Our interest 
at this point, however, is not theological but 
epistemological; for no theory of knowledge 
can be complete unless it shall apprehend the 
knowledge of self, even as we are apprehended 
in Christ. So far as our consciousness has 
entered into his, and his has filled ours to the 
full, will our theory of knowing be true to the 
whole truth concerning the nature of knowl- 
edge. 

Moreover, in such endeavor to know our- 
selves as we are known in Christ, and to esti- 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 87 

mate the value of personal life in Jesus' con- 
sciousness of its worth, we can not separate the 
Christ of history from the Christ of experience. 
It is not true to the manifestation of the Spirit 
which is given in him, when we put the ques- 
tion — Jesus or Christ? For the historical Jesus 
is the potential Christ of history. Jesus is him- 
self the creator of the ideal Christ. We mis- 
take no illusive feeling of our hearts for spir- 
itual reality; we lay hold of a law of personal 
energy as unbroken as the law of conservation 
of energy in nature, when we hold it to be true 
that Jesus Christ in his life on earth must have 
been, and was potentially in his person, all that 
he has become kinetically, and is, and shall 
continue to be in the life of the world. Scien- 
tifically stripped of the legendary, contemplated 
in the cold light of searching historical criti- 
cism, or discovered, as nothing else finds us, in 
the immediate response of our life to his, the 
personal influence of Jesus abides always with 
us; the Christ is to-day as always the spir- 
itual dynamic of the world. If, then, our pre- 
vious studies of genetic psychology shall have 
left us with the conviction that the evolution 



88 CONSTRUCTIVE 

of intelligence has not been itself an unintelli- 
gent process; that nature has come to itself 
as spirit in the free personal selfhood of which 
we have entered into possession — then this spir- 
itual meaning of our being will come to its 
final and full assurance in the Christian con- 
sciousness of life. Jesus' transcendent personal- 
ity raises above a merely materialistic estimate 
the worth of human personality. Biblical crit- 
icism leaves the Christ as the original source of 
the disciples' faith, the ever-present vitality of 
his church, and the revelation of the spiritual 
worth of man, even as the glory which he had 
received from the Father. 

Let us glance briefly at two significant as- 
pects of Jesus' life, still beholding him as he 
stands in his luminous personality against the 
background of nature. 

First, it is to be said that the mind that was 
in Jesus reveals in its transcendence the ide- 
ational energy immanent in personal being. 
That which psychology has to account for is 
not merely ideas, but the power to have ideas. 
Thinking is an act; it is energizing. This 
thinking energy, among all the other forms of 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 89 

energy, is the primary fact of mind in nature; 
here, likewise, as in the supposed cosmic ether, 
it is the motion, the energizing, that mere mech- 
anistic conceptions leave out of the account. 
The spiritual energy of the mind that was in 
Jesus reaches through the generations, and of 
the increase of its dominion there is no end. 
It is natural, yet it is supernal. It is human 
thinking, yet spiritual beyond measure. His 
thought is the energy of mind raised to its 
superlative. 

The spiritual energy of mind, which scientific 
psychology has to apprehend as a fact of na- 
ture, is manifested at its height in the method 
of Jesus' thinking, and by its stupendous power 
in creating the Christian consciousness of life. 
Nature in her fields and flowers gave to Jesus, 
as to other men, materials for parables, but in 
his thinking at once they took form and be- 
came parables of the Spirit. There is in his 
teaching a penetration of intuition, a clearness 
of vision, a spontaneity of expression, an im- 
mediate sense of reality, which have made him 
the spiritual authority of the world. From the 
infinite deeps of his God-consciousness truths 



9 o CONSTRUCTIVE 

shine out above all controversy supernal as the 
stars. 

If, indeed, as we have followed the sciences 
through the way of nature up to man we had 
observed no indications of meaning to lead us 
on; if we had discerned no signs of intelligent 
direction pointing toward some spiritual su- 
premacy; and then if suddenly we had come 
out before Jesus Christ; if thus unheralded and 
unexpected Jesus himself had appeared amid all 
the unintelligibleness of an aimless world; then 
would he be a miracle contrary to experience, 
and his God-consciousness seem an incredible 
revelation. Such instantaneous flaming forth 
in a mindless nature of the mind that is in 
Jesus might be a surprise beyond all under- 
standing, a marvel of mind so supernatural 
that it would not have left the natural uncon- 
sumed. But our Christ did not so come, and 
his divineness does not consume his natural- 
ness. Jesus, thinking his thought of God, nay 
rather Jesus thinking his thought with God, is 
come to fulfil all the law and the prophets that 
have been before him since the beginning of 
the world. To this day his mighty working is 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 91 

not all told in what men of old bear witness 
that he began to do at Cana of Galilee. Hover- 
ing above our city, his thought of it, for such as 
have eyes to see, over all our wronged and 
troubled earth, is his vision of the kingdom of 
heaven. He has made that real for us. His 
spiritual achievement is the prayer which he 
taught the world to pray, Thy kingdom come. 
The power which was in the mind of Jesus to 
behold Satan fallen from heaven when his dis- 
ciples told him of a few slight successes in his 
name, his power to behold the hereafter as God 
in heaven knows the eternal realities, the light 
within him of the new heavens and the new 
earth; this is the final and supreme achievement 
of the Spirit which is in man. To him it was 
given without the measure which our little 
sciences can measure. The Lord's prayer is 
itself a deed done, a mighty work accom- 
plished. When he taught his disciples to pray, 
Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, an act 
of spiritual power was achieved, a dynamic of 
ceaseless energy entered into human history 
by the word of a man made in the likeness of 
God. When his disciples continue repeating 



92 CONSTRUCTIVE 

his act of prayer, and feel its quickening power, 
they live in his life and see in his light. 

The other aspect of Jesus' final interpretation 
of personal life is to be observed in the power 
of his will to live — the potential energy in him 
to live his Godlike life among men. 

All that we know of the meaning of that 
word energy in outward nature is derived from 
its meaning to us in our conscious willing. The 
idealist has here the last word to speak to the 
physicist, as he affirms that the will to be as 
an individual is the ultimate unanalyzable 
actuality of existence. There is nothing given 
in experience more fundamental, more creative, 
more constant than the personal will to be. It 
is not separable from thinking; only in reflec- 
tions, not in the act of reflecting, can the will be 
isolated as an object of consciousness. It is per- 
vasive and active throughout our knowing our- 
selves and our world. This will of man to be, 
this energy of the personal will to live, is made 
manifest in its immortal potentiality in the 
will of Jesus to live as the Son of God. By it 
he overcame the world. And the unconquer- 
able force of the Christ-will to live has become 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 93 

the victory over death in the consciousness of 
generations of men, who in joy of sacrificial de- 
votion and in serene assurance of the power of 
an endless life have willed to lay down their 
lives and to take them up again with the Christ. 
Death itself, in Jesus' knowledge of it, was a 
part, a moment, an act of his living; dying 
was living into new life, not a hopeless defeat 
suffered, but an action and a victory achieved. 
To die is not merely something to be suffered; 
it is an act to be accomplished. So death in 
the Christian consciousness of dying has some- 
times seemed to be, as we may hope some day 
to experience it to be, not a mere passive pass- 
ing, a suffering endured, but an act of passing 
into life beyond life, — at the last an access of 
spiritual strength never so realized until then, 
a conservation of happiest memories in a hap- 
pier beginning of life's completions, a sense and 
vision of divine reality brightening into knowl- 
edge — even as for some whom we may have lost 
from sight for a little while the veil seemed to 
have been lifted as they passed into the invis- 
ible Presence in which we unseeing, and they 
henceforth beholding, live: as the perfect Man 



94 CONSTRUCTIVE 

knew full well that his God and ours is not the 
God of the dead but of the living, and his dis- 
ciples, having once known him, were henceforth 
well assured that whether we wake or sleep 
we live together with him. 

It would require a long chapter and a crit- 
ical study of biology and genetic psychology 
to gather the materials and appraise the evi- 
dential value of the argument for immortal- 
ity from the progressive evolution of nature 
and personality up to the Christ-consciousness 
of man. This, likewise, is part of the work of 
natural theology waiting to be done. Enough 
now to point only, as I am doing, to the unmis- 
takable sign of the meaning of personality in a 
realm of ends which is lifted up in the will of 
the Christ to live the eternal kind of life. That 
personal will, as it was manifested in superla- 
tive power in him, and as it works mightily in 
the Christian consciousness of life, is not a 
mere ideal creation, a speculation, a fond human 
hope; it is a fact, a fact among other facts of 
nature, as really so as any magnitude to be 
measured in the laboratory; the science of evo- 
lution is incomplete should it fail to recognize 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 95 

the Christ-fact as reality to be accounted for 
in a final natural philosophy. And at the end 
of all knowledge, the last sign of meaning 
pointing still on in the same direction into the 
unknown is — Immortality. 

In the presence of the consummate Man we 
ask again the same question with which we 
began, What is the worth of a man's life? We 
ask of the Christian consciousness, of which 
he is the creator and the light, What is the full 
significance of the world? Does nature have 
any discernible meaning? Is the nature that 
we see a palimpsest, written over with our ideas, 
but when stripped one after another of our im- 
pressions in itself a blank, whereon is nothing 
of meaning, no line of reason, nor word of the 
eternal? Or is it a scripture which we may 
read in part, discovering on its unfolding pages 
thought answering to our thought, and seem- 
ingly some far intent, running through its suc- 
cessive chapters, and waiting still to come to 
its conclusion ? Has all this fair world we love 
no secret of divinity at its heart? Is every 
expression of the Spirit that prophet and poet 



96 CONSTRUCTIVE 

see passing over the face of nature but illusive 
reflection of their thought; or can it indeed be 
their finer discernment of some indwelling Pres- 
ence, which would reveal itself to those who 
have hearts pure enough to see? So one may 
put the ultimate question of reason and of 
faith. 

Go back, then, once more with our question 
of the sign to the beginning — as far back to- 
ward the origin of things as the most adventu- 
rous science may go; then look to the end — as 
far toward the end as the vision of the trans- 
figured man, the ascended Christ, may suffer 
the most worshipful faith to gaze into the 
heavenlies. The way of the aeons between 
let science measure as it may — the materials, 
the powers, the mechanics of it from age to 
age; but the beginnings and the end, the origin 
lost from sight far away, and the glory at the 
end vanishing into the ineffable — of these what 
science can tell? Put the beginning in closest 
contrast with the end; that star-dust concentra- 
ted in our sun, that mind-dust, as Professor 
Clifford was wont to call the earliest gleams 
of intelligence in nature, in contrast with the 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 97 

final luminous Christ-consciousness of God; 
put that least living cell in its vast potential- 
ity beneath the eye of the mind that knows 
it in its very place in a living order; nay, put 
that cell in its unconscious prophecy of futu- 
rity beneath the eye of the Christ who knows 
that nothing falls to the ground without the 
Fathers notice; consider the way of life, what 
it means, from it to him, to him in his con- 
sciousness of the mystery of the Godhead — the 
distance passed, the end attained — the mystery 
of divine personality revealed — the life mani- 
fested in the fellowship of the Father and the 
Son, for in reality our fellowship is with him. 
Our God is one God; nature is one revelation 
of the Spirit; we are made partakers of the 
divine nature. In the beginning was the Word, 
and the Word was with God and was God. 
We have seen his glory, glory as of the only 
begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. 
Such the new natural theology may find to be 
the world-view, which science leaves open to 
faith, but itself may not enter. Yet there is 
a spirituality of the scientific mind, of which I 
shall have somewhat to say in the next lecture. 



IV 

SCIENTIFIC SPIRITUALITY 

ENTER a laboratory and stand by a win- 
dow, while a man of science at his table is 
conducting some research. He can not allow 
himself to look out of the window and let his 
mind wander far and away; his eye must be 
fixed on his instrument of precision by means 
of which he would measure a wave-length, de- 
fine a microscopic object, or catch what he can 
find in a vacuum tube. Any theological obser- 
vation of mine would be an interference with 
his work as a nature-searcher. And when he 
has finished and made careful note of his ob- 
servation, he has with the same precision to 
regard the fact he has observed in its connec- 
tion with other facts previously discovered, and 
to verify his observations by repeating them 
and by control experiments; still further, he 

must think the facts observed over and over in 

98 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 99 

all possible relations, grouping them and put- 
ting them together in some unifying concep- 
tion, that he may thereby recognize the method 
or law of nature which their mutual behavior 
discloses; and then his work begins again, for 
he must apply that mental conception to some 
other research, going back with it to nature 
once more, and using the knowledge thus ac- 
quired as his working-creed in the reasonable 
hope that thereby he may push human knowl- 
edge a little farther out into the alluring vast- 
ness of the unknown. And here again he has 
to exercise renewed self-control, lest his work- 
ing-creed becomes an obscuring dogmatism, 
and his mind may not see what nature itself 
next would open to his understanding. In this 
he affords to us students of divine revelation 
a most excellent example. This scientific work 
and sustained mental attitude require rigorous 
intellectual discipline and compel the man of 
science in his working hours to put all sen- 
timent or personal opinions behind him. He 
might not like to have one of us write over the 
door of his laboratory the words which Dante 
saw written over the Inferno, "Abandon hope, 



ioo CONSTRUCTIVE 

all ye who enter here"; but once in his work- 
shop he himself as a true man of science, for 
the sake of the truthfulness of his work, is under 
exacting obligation to shut out from his mind 
the sentiments, personal opinions, or beliefs of 
any kind that might cast an interfering shadow 
even over the clearness and accuracy of his 
observation. Very naturally, therefore, this 
necessary habit of keeping thought close to 
the fact, and of admitting nothing incapable 
of proof, may not predispose a thorough scien- 
tific man to a confession of religious beliefs, 
although it may cause him to realize most pro- 
foundly how small is the extent of the things 
that can be proved, and how large is the do- 
main that must be possessed b}^ faith. 

But while the investigator is thus intent on 
his immediate object of research, I, who have 
stolen into his laboratory, while watching him 
in his experimentation, may glance out of the 
window, and into the distant sky, seeing there 
nothing that has form or substance, not so 
much, perhaps, as a passing cloud, only a far 
horizon line and a vacant expanse and depth 
of blue. But, remembering what the worker 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 101 

at the table, and many before him who willed 
to know, have taught me to know, as I look 
over his shoulder out into space and let the 
thoughts come to me that may, that vacant 
vista of light suddenly changes into a scene of 
fascinating interest, a field of intense activi- 
ties. That emptiness of space is peopled with 
a heavenly host of radiances innumerable — 
regiments and lines of contending forces sweep 
across it; swift emissaries from all the thrones 
of light appear in those depths of blue; poten- 
tates, principalities, dominions of solar sys- 
tems, the great world-powers surrounding this 
little earth, are met to make for us God's peace 
in the quiet of that evening sky. What does the 
man of science at the work-bench care for that? 
Nothing, perhaps, just at that moment; he is 
using his imagination to enable him to see a 
little farther into the wonder of th^hing be- 
fore his eye; I was simply letting my imagina- 
tion, as we all at times must do, render more 
real to me the realities of the deep things of 
God that no eye can see. It is the same power 
of imagination, the same power of mind over 
nature in both of us; exercised in either way, 



io2 CONSTRUCTIVE 

it has the same right and reason to lead us on, 
and out, and up in the love and the pursuit of 
truth. 

The day passes; the scientist and I walk 
homeward together. Unconsciously, uncon- 
fessedly, we both may have learned in differ- 
ent ways much the same lesson, he intent on 
his labor, I gazing idly out of the window; 
for neither of us by searching has found out 
the Almighty, and he very likely, as he closes 
his laboratory door, leaving there his work un- 
finished, may have realized more deeply than 
I how God's ways are past finding out. To 
each of us another lesson, deeper, more human, 
diviner, may have come unsought on our home- 
ward way; and to him perhaps most needful, 
as his little child runs out to meet him and he 
enters the door of his home — the lesson of God 
which SaMWohn had learned from his Christ: 
"We love^Wcause He first loved us." 

There is a scientific type of spiritual-minded- 
ness; and of its worth and use some things 
may fittingly be said in this school of religion. 

It is to be recognized as a definite variety of 
spirituality that has been formed in the envi- 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 103 

ronment of Christianity. Consciously or un- 
consciously it has grown and bears its fruit 
under the influence and in the light of the 
Christ. This spiritual type has its Christian 
heredity, determinant of its character, which 
it may modify in its individuality, but from 
the formative influence of which it may no 
more escape than any transmission of life may 
from the Mendelian law of dominant char- 
acters. It is, then, with the scientific spiritual- 
ity that draws the breath of its life in the at- 
mosphere of religious idealism and develops in 
the environment of Hebrew-Christian faiths, 
that we have to do. 

It is to be differentiated from several well- 
known forms of religious experience. 

It is to be distinguished from that kind of 
spiritual apprehension which in general may 
be designated as mystical. It is not character- 
ized by immediate mystical vision. The scien- 
tific mind night after night will search the 
heavens with the telescope; but it could not 
keep the saint's lonely vigil until the narrow 
cell should be flooded with ineffable light. 

Neither does this kind of spirituality wear 



io 4 CONSTRUCTIVE 

the sign of mystical pietism. It waits not 
with Tauler on God; nor with Madame Guion 
in the still hour is it lost in contemplation of 
the divine. It would not for a moment allow 
its mental energies to run to waste in the placid 
diffuseness of the so-called "new thought" liter- 
ature of our time. The scientific mind is an 
active intelligence, every morning off on the 
hunt, keenly observant that no least sign may 
escape it, and careful to prevent its compass 
from being deflected by any personal belong- 
ings. The scientific man can not be expected, 
then, to sit still under unscientific preaching, 
and to know God. Rather under such preach- 
ing he might recall a word of Pascal — that pro- 
found thinker who at the age of sixteen had 
composed a little tractate on conic sections, 
and at twenty-six had made brilliant experi- 
ments in hydrostatics and pneumatics, and 
who then abandoned a splendid career in sci- 
ence to become a religious recluse and to pro- 
duce his immortal Provincial Letters — this word 
of Pascal which any of us may well bear in mind 
in the preparation for our preaching: "Our 
whole dignity consists, then, in thought. Our 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 105 

elevation must be derived from this, not from 
space and duration, which we can not fill. Let 
us endeavor, then, to think well; this is the prin- 
ciple of ethics. "* 

The scientific type of spirituality is to be dis- 
tinguished also from transcendental intuition. 
It numbers among its teachers neither Origen 
from among the Neo-Platonists; nor Augus- 
tine with his glorious Confessions; nor Hegel 
with his dialectic of the universe; nor Schleier- 
macher in his feeling of absolute dependence; 
neither does it cultivate the transcendentalism 
of Emerson, which, like some rare exotic plant 
in a conservatory of light and warmth, man- 
aged to blossom amid the clear, cold analytic 
of our orthodox New England climate. 

It may have more affinity for the vital in- 
sight, the intuition given in the very act of 
living, of which Bergson is now the philosophic 
knight errant, with lance in rest against all 
opponents. In its own way, within its proper 
field of observation, the scientific mind has 
learned the value of insight as well as of im- 
agination; for to swift intuitions, to daring im- 
1 Ch. II, X. 



io6 CONSTRUCTIVE 

aginations, science owes some of its most brill- 
iant discoveries and its best-attested utilities. 
In this way of discovery also it has gained its 
own reverent sense of the Unknown One. As 
the man of science beholds in a glass darkly 
the infinite mystery of the universe, none may 
understand more religiously than he this re- 
covered saying of our Lord, if, indeed, this 
saying is a genuine reminiscence of the great 
Teacher who once walked through the fields 
with his disciples, and who had not where to lay 
his head save under the starry Syrian sky: "He 
that wonders shall reign, and he that reigns 
shall rest." Even this, the wonder, the reign, 
and then the rest of mind, may characterize 
scientific spirituality. 

One mark of its spiritual genuineness is its 
devotion to the service of knowing truth. For 
science is service, and often a hard service. 
Scientific devotion, kept unbroken until death, 
is the troth of a man's being to God's truth, 
and whether the man who is loyal to it through 
life is conscious of it or not, this lifelong will 
to know is itself one of the spiritual powers 
and a witness of the Spirit in man. It is a 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 107 

will that might urge archangel on farthest flight 
to uttermost omnipresence of God in the 
heavens, eager and ever rejoicing to know the 
divine order and reason of the creation. Here 
among the crucibles and mechanisms of the 
laboratories, shut within the limits of these 
bodily senses and compelled to work only with 
quantities that can be weighed and measured, 
nevertheless the scientific mind bears the sign 
of the spiritual nobility of human nature, and 
witnesses its spiritual lordship as throughout 
the patient years of research it succeeds in 
bringing one thing after another into subjec- 
tion to it. 

But, you may think, is not this a sceptic's 
spirit rather than what we are accustomed to 
regard as spiritual-mindedness? Very likely; 
but if it be doubt, it is like Abraham's doubt 
of the worth of life to him should he spend 
his days keeping his father's scattered sheep; 
a doubt which was for him the venture of a 
great faith that led him to seek a better coun- 
try; scientific doubt may be — I am not saying 
it always is, but in its nobler aspiration it 
surely is — the doubt that goes forth to be a 



io8 CONSTRUCTIVE 

sojourner in a land of promise, not knowing 
whither it goes, but looking through all this 
phenomenal world for the reality that has 
foundations, whose maker and builder may be 
diviner than we know. I am not speaking in 
such language of the vainglorious doubt of the 
intellectual smart set; not theirs the quiet 
hours of waiting for the self-revelation of na- 
ture; nor theirs the faith in reason and reality 
of the true scientific spirit. I am thinking of 
the genuine man of science, of the man who will 
not deny his own intellectual devotion to truth 
by failing to keep a heart as reverent and as 
humble as that of the simplest believer who 
looks up with worshipful eyes to the Madonna 
and the Holy Child, or who may receive the 
sacramental symbol of the real presence of 
God with man. 

Still the question may be thrown back, 
But is there not a real difference between these 
two mental dispositions? Yes, of course, and 
yet no. Differences there are of aim, habit, 
method, mood, and also of religious confession; 
But many of our religious differences do not 
go down as deep as one might think. I have 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 109 

been, for example, at a revival meeting in a 
Protestant church, and, seated in the rear where 
I might watch the psychology of the crowd, I 
have observed the effect, passing like a wave 
over the congregation, of the evangelists emo- 
tional presentation of the mother story. You 
recognize the type — the familiar story of the 
mother and the son — of the evangelist's appeal. 
Then I stole in mind from that crowded church 
under the spell of the mother story to a cathe- 
dral chapel, where silent worshippers on bended 
knees, and some with tearful eyes, were offer- 
ing their devotions before the Madonna and the 
Child. It was an easy thing to transfer the 
feeling, the effect from the one place to the 
other; in the Protestant church it was a pic- 
ture in words of the mother and her child; in 
the other it was a painter's vision of the Ma- 
donna. But the devotion, the feeling, the spell, 
were much the same. It was the same appeal 
of holy purity and love. The differences that 
keep us so far apart in our external attitudes, 
or our vain ecclesiasticisms, are not always 
psychologically so real, so spiritually divisive 
as they seem. So I would say the scientific 



no CONSTRUCTIVE 

type of spirituality may be more profoundly 
religious than those who have not 'experienced 
it may imagine. 

Yes, but after all it may be said: Are you 
not thus supposing a certain double-mind- 
edness; how can a purely scientific man be a 
religious believer without becoming a kind of 
double personality? Certainly no ultimate du- 
alism, no necessary conflict, can be admitted 
between the natural man and the spiritual 
man. No final contradiction can be assumed 
between nature so far as known and the uni- 
verse that is to be known. How, then, may 
the sceptic and the mystic exist together in the 
same honest mind ? A sufficient answer would 
be that they often do. But if one speaks this 
moment as a scientist and another moment as 
a religionist, does he not contradict himself? 
Yes, as life is often caught contradicting itself, 
that it may the better find its own underlying 
unities. A closer introspective view may re- 
veal the fundamental integrity of his being. 
The scientific determinant and the spiritual 
determinant, to speak in biological terms, do 
coexist and cowork in one's thinking and liv- 



NATURAL THEOLOGY in 

ing, however they may be dissected in our anal- 
ysis of the contents of consciousness. To cut 
out either from our living would be to render 
oneself less than a man. It is also true that 
either one of these factors, the sceptical or the 
mystical, may be the dominant and the other 
the recessive factor in one's natural heredity. 
But these and other elements of our nature, or 
phases of our development, are not necessarily 
vital incompatibles. In different blends they 
appear and reappear in our individualities. 
Man is born to live both as a sceptical inquirer 
and as a spiritual believer; he impairs his in- 
heritance, he trifles with the rich complexity 
of his nature, if he fails to recognize and make 
increase of himself through both. To reconcile 
ourselves to ourselves may often prove a hard 
task; but it certainly is not to be accomplished 
by destroying any elemental part of us; not 
by silencing notes, but by combining them, may 
we "beat our music out." To be true alike to 
the natural and the spiritual is to keep to the 
end our personal integrity; nothing less is per- 
fect simplicity. 

There may linger in some minds this sus- 



ii2 CONSTRUCTIVE 

picion concerning what has just been said. 
Grant, they may think, that a scientific man 
need not necessarily become a denatured man 
fit only for laboratory purposes, but not so 
well for human uses; nevertheless, must it not 
be admitted that the prevailing temper and 
usual result of scientific studies have not been 
to render men distinctively religious; should 
those studies therefore be admitted with such 
simple confidence as you suggest into the cur- 
riculum of a theological seminary ? Should such 
questions be dropped by professors into the 
note-books from which youthful preachers must 
draw materials for their sermons? 

To a considerable extent, it must be allowed, 
the scientific temper has not been confessedly 
religious, and in some instances it has had a 
despiritualizing influence. Yet for much op- 
position of science the hostility of the church 
must bear its full share of responsibility. When 
theological dogmatisms put scientific positiv- 
ism on the defensive, there were hard blows to 
be received as well as given. But since biblical 
and historical scholarship has recognized in the 
method of science its ally, all that has been 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 113 

changed. The conflict between religion and 
science is at an end, at least among men of 
good will and a liberal education. Much of 
the pseudo-science of the sensational magazines 
is indeed destructive of spiritual faiths; but 
that is as unscientific as it is irreligious. Nor is 
there necessity of spiritual atrophy as a conse- 
quence of scientific pursuits. Grant that La- 
place, speaking as a mathematician, was right 
when, in searching the heavens, he said he had 
no need of the hypothesis of a God; but Kep- 
ler was not wrong, nor did he cease to be 
one of the first among astronomers, when, hav- 
ing discovered the laws of planetary motions, 
he exclaimed, "I think God's thoughts after 
him.' , Nor was Clerk Maxwell's great work in 
magnetism in conflict with his spirituality when 
he said, "I have looked into most philosoph- 
ical systems, and I have seen that none will 
work without a God." 1 And, to quote but 
one of many other witnesses to a scientific 
spirituality, Sir E. Ray Lancaster, in a presi- 
dential address to the British Association for 
the Advancement of Science, reminded them 

1 "Life," p. 426. 



ii 4 CONSTRUCTIVE 

that the association had its birthplace under 
the walls of York Minster, and, quoting these 
words of Archbishop Creighton, "Religion 
means the knowledge of our destiny and of 
the means of fulfilling it," he added: "We can 
say no more and no less of science. Men of 
science seek in all reverence to discover the 
Almighty, the Everlasting. They claim sym- 
pathy and friendship with those who, like 
themselves, have turned away from the more 
material struggles of human life and have set 
their hearts and minds on the knowledge of 
the eternal." 1 

Scientific spirituality, then, is to be esteemed 
as genuine, although it may not always be a 
dominant character or may have but slight 
confession to offer of positive beliefs. For such 
recognition of it among the prophets of the un- 
seen and the ideal, the saying of the Master is 
sufficient: "He that is not against us is for us." 

It remains for me to suggest some ways in 
which just this type of spirituality may have 
its place and service among other recognized 
varieties of religious experience 

1 Brit. Assoc. Reports, 1906, p. 42. 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 115 

First of all, it is to be said that it is well fitted 
to survive amid modern conditions of life and 
thought. It is at once the heir of philosophic 
doubt and a forerunner of coming knowledge 
of the highest power in evolution. It shall aid 
us to take thoughtful heed of the word of the 
prophet of old who would have Israel know the 
way of the Lord through their history: "See it," 
he cried, "see it as a whole." Knowledge of 
the oneness of the whole creation is not far 
from faith in the kingdom of God. 

Scientific spirituality shall thus come to our 
aid when at times in the brokenness of our hu- 
man experiences we shall have most need to 
regain a unifying sense of life — the uplifting and 
serene sense of life as a whole and of our per- 
sonal part and worth in the universal good — 
the religious sense of our belonging to God's 
thought and purpose that includes us as parts 
of its greatness; such as was Jesus' conscious- 
ness of his personal life when he said these two 
words as though they were but one: "My 
Father is greater than I," and, "I and my 
Father are one." To this end the natural sci- 
ences shall bring their evidence of the signif- 



u6 CONSTRUCTIVE 

icance even of that which seems least on this 
little earth amid the vast significance of the 
whole order of the heavens. Thus the man 
scientifically trained may believe and disbe- 
lieve and yet believe again, may doubt and 
yet inquire again, as always in the presence of 
one reality, transcending finite thought, yet 
known in part. He may impart to us his 
restful, deeper consciousness of the oneness of 
himself with all selfhood, of his nature with all 
nature, of his reason with the universal reason, 
of his spirit with the spirit that moves the 
worlds. 

Furthermore, this kind of spiritual-minded- 
ness proves useful in preventing other types 
of religious experience from falling into par- 
tialness and exclusiveness to their own hurt. 
It will serve to check on the one side a perilous 
tendency to overbelief, and on the other a pre- 
cipitous fall into unbelief. 

The variant forms of religious experience 
need repeated readjustments, mutual balan- 
cings, and reactions for the perfecting of the 
faithful. Mysticism, left unchecked, becomes 
a self-consuming flame; pietism, overstrained, 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 117 

relapses into religious limpness; emotional re- 
vivalism is sometimes in peril of losing moral 
virility. There are not unknown among our 
churches characters that resemble the inert 
atoms which physicists tell us are left as re- 
sultants of electrolysis; once intensely vibra- 
ting in the electric field, then settling on the 
cathode pole, they have lost their electric 
charge and become dead atoms; so spiritual 
emotionalism may end in religious inertia. 

Intellectualism likewise in religion is too 
prone to stiffen into devitalized dogmatisms, a 
system of orthodoxy to harden into a crustacean 
rationalism. Among these the free, reverent, 
sceptical, but truth-seeking spirit of science, 
often perplexed but not cast down, some- 
times persecuted but not destroyed, has been 
called to its apostolate. In the earthen ves- 
sels of its perishable theories it has its treas- 
ures — its word of the exceeding greatness of 
the power of God in nature, and the divers 
ways of revelation. Well may the Church wel- 
come the spirit of science among its teachers; 
let those who have no need to feel its doubt 
and who can not enter into its struggle, know 



n8 CONSTRUCTIVE 

that it brings from an older theophany than 
Mount Sinai its law, and that it is not the 
least of the prophets of the realm of order, of 
worth, and fulfilments of all ideals. 

Another service that science may render to 
spirituality is to impart to it a simpler natu- 
ralness. It leads religion -out into nature and 
brings nature back into religion. It spiritual- 
izes the outward world, not as pure idealism 
would do by taking materiality out of it, but 
by perceiving the material take form and life 
from the spiritual. It leaves us not to wander 
as shades of ourselves in a realm of shadows; 
for us all things working together make reality, 
and our individualities are not as passing clouds 
catching an hour's sunshine and dissolving into 
the indistinguishable absolute. In out-of-door 
religion we live and breathe, and are ourselves 
in free, full, joyous sense and communion with 
the life that is in all and over all. The spirit 
of science shall not take from us the love of 
nature, which fills our modern poetry as with 
the voice of many waters; for day uttereth 
unto day speech of nature's glory to our science, 
and night unto night showeth knowledge. 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 119 

Again science is among us to teach our the- 
ologies humility. If one were to inquire of the 
noblest scientific investigators, as well as of the 
greatest thinkers and seers, at what times they 
were most profoundly humble, I doubt not 
their answer would be: at those moments when 
we were most exalted; when new knowledge 
inspired us to fresh endeavor; when reason had 
led us to the last outlook into the infinite be- 
yond; when the mystery of truth inexpressible 
overshadowed us; then were we most humbly 
worshipful. God alone is great. In the earlier 
years of modern knowledge Doctor Chalmers, 
in one of his famous astronomical discourses, 
described the "Modesty of True Science." 
Science may bring to our theologies the lesson 
of humility it has learned from vaster knowl- 
edge of the universe. 

The scientific spirit also may teach anew the 
religious lesson of unworldliness. It is free from 
the vice of religion for the sake of happiness, 
which Coleridge once stigmatized, as did Her- 
bert Spencer after him, as other-worldliness. 
Applied science, it is true, often pays good divi- 
dends, as indeed applied religion also may do in 



i2o CONSTRUCTIVE 

this present world. Pure science disinterestedly 
pursued for its own sake sometimes brings un- 
sought and unexpected rewards. But lifelong 
devotion to a single science is in many instances 
an unworldly aim and may become a sacrificial 
passion. 

A broad-minded Roman Catholic theologian 
in this country once said: "Property is com- 
munion with God through the material world. " 
Still more profoundly may it be said of natural 
science that it is communion with God through 
the material world. In unworldiness of aim, 
also, the scientific spirit enters into the power 
of the endless life, though it may not be aware 
of the full reach of its passion for intellectual 
achievement. But in love of knowledge it has 
gained survival value. It thinks for eternity. 
Its will to know the truth can not be satisfied 
with a few years of limited research in an earth- 
ly laboratory. Pure science asserts against all 
commercializing of education, it affirms above 
all mere literary playing with realities, that life 
is worth living as a noble venture for knowledge. 
In the midst of the unrealities of outworn phil- 
osophic speculations it shows by its works its 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 121 

abiding and inspiring faith that man is made 
to seek until he finds, to knock and it shall be 
opened unto him; and thus confessing before 
the world its working-faith, it brings to relig- 
ion itself new witness to the inestimable worth 
of our personal being in a realm of ends; nay, 
more, it offers the argument of its own high 
calling that the universe which has brought it 
to the birth shall not in the end turn upon it 
and devour it. Amid existing tendencies to- 
ward commercializing education; when to go 
through college is not always to acquire the 
power to think; when in the world outside, 
and even in a church-atmosphere too enerva- 
ting for high argument of divinity, the intellec- 
tual pursuit of truth may seem a lonely walk, 
and few to meet one in that way; when the 
pews count it a gain that theological preach- 
ing is become a lost art, and ministers them- 
selves may be tempted to rest content in call- 
ing all men brethren, unmindful of humanities' 
profoundest cry: "Show us the Father, and it 
is enough": to us, I would say, at this time, 
scientific spirituality may come with a clear 
call and a noble passion, and bid us once and 



122 CONSTRUCTIVE 

again seek for the truth of the living God with 
all our mind and with all our strength; for in 
fulfilling these words of the commandment one 
may love also with all his heart. 

The stricter intellectual discipline of scien- 
tific thinking, issuing, as it does, in a nobler 
sense of the intellectual worth of life, may re- 
new our faith in man's survival value, and 
create for the eager scientific spirit a new sym- 
bolism for the future life. Fitting symbols for 
the future reward and joyous activity of the 
scientific spirit hereafter would hardly be those 
of the Hebrew-Christian Apocalypse, which to 
believers of old represented the values of life laid 
up in heaven. Not the celestial city with gates 
of pearl and streets of gold would be the sym- 
bol of the intellectual immortality and satisfac- 
tion of the pure scientific spirit; to it rather 
the least particle of earthiness that leaves mat- 
ter nearest the creative power, the last perfec- 
tion of matter in the wondrous organization of 
the human brain, and the lines of the spec- 
troscope that bid us understand that this 
earth of ours is consubstantial with all the ce- 
lestial spheres — these and such visible signs as 



NATURAL THEOLOGY 123 

these of the things waiting to be revealed shall 
be the evidence and the symbols of the glory 
of the knowledge of God that passeth knowl- 
edge. The image of a worthy scientific hope 
of the life hereafter would not be the seraph 
with harp of sweetest tone, but rather one like 
that other angel whom Saint John saw "stand- 
ing in the sun" at the centre and source of light 
ineffable, with undimmed eye gazing the whole 
circle of the heavens round, and calling to all 
the stars. 

Scientific spirituality may not indeed be 
clothed outwardly in such religious habit as 
we might deem desirable; but who shall say 
that it is not worthy, and great shall be its 
reward. Its presence among us may enhance 
our religious conception of the worth of life 
here and hereafter. 



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